Artifacts removal for color projection on 3D models using flash light

Lighting artifacts are one of the main issues in digital photography: complex light setups are needed to attenuate or remove them. Flash light is a very easy way to illuminate an object or an environment, but it is rarely considered in most of the Computer Graphics and Computer Vision applications. This is due to the big amount of artifacts introduced by this lighting, and to the difficulty in modeling its behavior. In this paper we present a simple method to use flash light in the context of color acquisition and mapping on 3D models. We propose a simple way to accurately estimate the flash position with respect to the camera, and we propose two automatic methods to detect and remove artifacts from a set of images which are registered to a 3D model. These methods are integrated in the context of a color mapping framework. The results show that it is possible to obtain high quality colored 3D models using flash light, which is the most simple illumination setup. This results are extremely important especially in the context of Cultural heritage, where the acquisition of color has often to be performed on site, without a specific lighting setup.