Scattering robust 3D reconstruction via polarized transient imaging.

Reconstructing 3D structure of scenes in the scattering medium is a challenging task with great research value. Existing techniques often impose strong assumptions on the scattering behaviors and are of limited performance. Recently, a low-cost transient imaging system has provided a feasible way to resolve the scene depth, by detecting the reflection instant on the time profile of a surface point. However, in cases with scattering medium, the rays are both reflected and scattered during transmission, and the depth calculated from the time profile largely deviates from the true value. To handle this problem, we used the different polarization behaviors of the reflection and scattering components, and introduced active polarization to separate the reflection component to estimate the scattering robust depth. Our experiments have demonstrated that our approach can accurately reconstruct the 3D structure underlying the scattering medium.