Today, with quality becoming increasingly important, each product requires three-dimensional in-line quality control. On the other hand, the 3D reconstruction of transparent objects is a very difficult problem in computer vision due to transparency and specularity of the surface. This paper proposes a new method, called Scanning From Heating (SFH), to determine the surface shape of transparent objects using laser surface heating and thermal imaging. Furthermore, the application to transparent glass is discussed and results on different surface shapes are presented.

Three-dimensional surface acquisition is a subject that has been studied to a large extent; a significant number of techniques for acquiring shapes have been proposed, and a wide range of commercial solutions is available. Nevertheless, today's systems still have difficulties when digitizing objects that are transparent or semitransparent in the visible range. In this paper, some of the issues of traditional scanning systems are addressed by considering the radiative properties of materials. As a result, an infrared laser light-based scanner is presented for successfully acquiring the shape of complex surfaces by analyzing heat patterns that are emitted by the object.