Diego Nehab will present his preFPO on Thursday November 30 at 4PM in Room 401 (note room!). The members of his committee are: Szymon Rusinkiewicz, advisor, James Davis (UC Santa Cruz), Tom Funkhouser, Adam Finkelstein, and Kai Li. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract appears below. --------------------------- In this talk, we present a variety of results that push the state of the art in 3D scanning techniques towards new simplicity, generality, and precision levels. We start with the introduction of the temporal stereo triangulation scanner, which is composed of two cameras and a projector. The system is substantially simpler than previous designs, because the projector does not need to be calibrated or even synchronized with the stereo camera pair. In order to improve the quality of our scanner, we introduce a novel algorithm that performs symmetric sub pixel refinement of integer matches. By simultaneously updating the matching coordinates on each camera, the method avoids biases that would otherwise appear as coherent noise in the final reconstructions. We then investigate the combination of data coming from a variety of different scanner types. We notice that the noise properties of acquired normal fields are generally unrelated to those commonly present in triangulated data. By carefully combining the best portion of each measurement type, we are able to achieve substantially higher quality results. Both normal acquisition and stereo triangulation are usually designed under the assumption of diffuse, opaque materials. We therefore conclude the talk with an investigation of alternative techniques for acquiring shape and orientation from translucent and/or highly specular materials.