∞ Scanning Time ∞
Today’s inspiration:
We would like to introduce you to our new motion scanning system.
The “AeonX Motion Scanning System”.
The word aeon /ˈiːɒn/, also spelled eon (in American English) and æon, originally meant “life”, “vital force” or “being”, “generation” or “a period of time”, though it tended to be translated as “age” in the sense of “ages”, “forever”, “timeless” or “for eternity”.
We have re-designed our in house custom motion scanning system. Now utilizing Ximea (www.ximea.com) PCI-E based cameras using the Sony Pregius sensor.
We can record at base speed 60fps at 12MP up to 120 FPS at 8MP. Our new system captures 35GB’s of RAW data every second. We use Global Shutter cameras that have precise hardware genlocked synchronization. Combined with separate synchronized audio recording.
We can now scan dynamic FACS sessions, which will typically record Terabytes of data at a time. We’ve built our own camera interface and storage system alongside Ximea. Using our own bespoke triggering hardware and software solution built from the ground up.
IR’s Motion Scanning Research History
Spanning over 12 years of research
Since our first
IR’s Motion Scanning System Comes Online
Our new Ximea system first comes online in the summer of 2018
AeonX First Test from Infinite-Realities 2018 on Vimeo.
This video showcases our first ever Ximea test, only testing 16 synchronized cameras here, using constant illumination at 50fps, in 8bit mode, with audio synchronization. There was no solution like this available on the market. Everything from the camera control software to the audio recording, to the camera triggering, all had to be built from scratch.
To us, this system is a true marvel. When we first started building industry leading full body photogrammetry systems back in 2011, just being able to synchronize 16x cameras once every 15-30 seconds at 1/100th exposure was a huge undertaking. Now, we have to synchronize 48x cameras.. at 60 times a second. This required a custom built genlock triggering system.
We can synchronize our cameras at up to 1us and we are able to use exposure speeds exceeding 500us (1/2000th of a second). Utilizing LED synchronization (from ida-tronic.com) and fast exposure speeds we can eliminate motion blur and not blind our scan subjects!
Motion Scanning in 360 Degrees
Fast exposure speeds, LED synchronization and 35GB/s of data
Next Generation Motion Scanning from Infinite-Realities 2018 on Vimeo.
In late 2018 we were finally able to trigger and synchronize all of our 48x Ximea machine vision cameras. This was a real eureka moment.
Years of research, a bottomless pit of money and 1000’s of hours spent testing. With a great deal of help from Ximea, Bevis Tech Ltd and Ida-Tronic.
Each camera records at 750MB/s in 8bit mode or 1.5GB/s in 12bit (16bit) mode. In total all 48x cameras can stream to disk at 35GB/s in 8bit mode. Or 2.1TB/m. We can record performances for up to 5-10 minutes. Data storage will vary but a typical 1-minute recording can total around 2TB’s of RAW
This is all just one part of the puzzle. We then had to figure out how to organize, pre-process, store and reconstruct all this data as no current off the shelf pipeline existed.
Custom 4D Reconstruction Pipeline
In our early days of reconstruction testing, we utilized Agisoft Photoscan. Agisoft has excellent built-in timeline and processing tools (which we helped specify) but it lacked in some areas such as UV optimization and texture quality across time.
We have since moved over to Reality Capture with the help from the team at Capturing Reality we can now utilize CLI processing techniques using a set of custom-designed processing stages. Whilst the CLI tools set is rudimentary it does allow us to get the best detail possible from the application. We have since integrated Houdini into the mix using our own custom pipeline to break up processing into stages and to overcome inherent bugs in the CLI version that have yet to be fixed
Below you can see some of our very early processing tests, unoptimized RAW data.
RAW Scan Test from Infinite-Realities 2018 on Vimeo.
RAW Scan Test 2 from Infinite-Realities 2018 on Vimeo.
AeonX Scanning BR04 from Infinite-Realities on Vimeo.
AeonX Scanning BR09 from Infinite-Realities on Vimeo.
You can reach us at contact@ir-ltd.net for more information.
