Color-Encoded Illumination for High-Speed Volumetric Scene Reconstruction

2026-04-29

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of capturing three-dimensional information from high-speed dynamic scenes using conventional low-frame-rate cameras, which are inherently limited in temporal resolution. Existing high-speed imaging approaches often rely on specialized hardware modifications or are constrained to single-view setups, hindering multi-view high-speed volumetric reconstruction. To overcome these limitations, the authors propose a novel computational imaging paradigm that employs temporally coded colored illumination to encode high-speed motion into color channels. This enables synchronized standard low-speed, multi-view cameras—without any hardware modification—to capture the necessary data for reconstructing high-frame-rate 3D volumes. By integrating a dynamic Gaussian splatting algorithm to decode the spatio-temporal information, the method achieves multi-view high-speed 3D reconstruction solely with off-the-shelf cameras. Its efficacy and practicality are validated through both simulated and real-world multi-camera experiments.

Abstract

The task of capturing and rendering 3D dynamic scenes from 2D images has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, most conventional cameras are bandwidth-limited to 30-60 FPS, restricting these methods to static or slowly evolving scenes. While overcoming bandwidth limitations is difficult for general scenes, recent years have seen a flurry of computational imaging methods that yield high-speed videos using conventional cameras for specific applications (e.g., motion capture and particle image velocimetry). However, most of these methods require modifications to a camera's optics or the addition of mechanically moving components, limiting them to a single-view high-speed capture. Consequently, these methods cannot be readily used to capture a 3D representation of rapid scene motion. In this paper, we propose a novel method to capture and reconstruct a volumetric representation of a high-speed scene using only unaugmented low-speed cameras. Instead of modifying the hardware or optics of each individual camera, we encode high-speed scene dynamics by illuminating the scene with a rapid, sequential color-coded sequence. This results in simultaneous multi-view capture of the scene, where high-speed temporal information is encoded in the spatial intensity and color variations of the captured images. To construct a high-speed volumetric representation of the dynamic scene, we develop a novel dynamic Gaussian Splatting-based approach that decodes the temporal information from the images. We evaluate our approach on simulated scenes and real-world experiments using a multi-camera imaging setup, showing first-of-a-kind high-speed volumetric scene reconstructions.

Problem

• high-speed volumetric reconstruction
• low-speed cameras
• 3D dynamic scenes
• temporal encoding
• multi-view capture

Innovation

• Color-encoded illumination
• High-speed volumetric reconstruction
• Dynamic Gaussian Splatting
• Multi-view imaging
• Computational imaging