Abstract The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has developed and patented three high‐resolution 3D imaging systems and processing algorithms which have been applied to a wide range of museum and heritage recording applications. The systems have been designed for different imaging applications and, in collaboration with a number of national and international museums and cultural agencies, have been used to scan a wide variety of objects and sites. The objective of this paper is to present a summary of the 3D technology and examples of its heritage applications. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A very compact optical range sensor is described which is to be used for the acquisition of the range information for the navigation of a mobile platform. A short review of the techniques currently used to acquire range data for a mobile vehicle is included. Some advantages and disadvantages of the different methods are presented. Emphasis is placed on a possible short-to-medium-term solution of the problem of robot navigation. A short description of the optical principle of the range sensor BIRIS, its real-time implementation on a commercially available image processing system, and its performance are presented. The high immunity of the sensor to ambient illumination and external perturbations is also demonstrated. Experimental results and a technique for the detection of the free space surrounding the vehicle using the range data are given.>

A method is described for estimating range flow (space displacement vector field) on a nonrigid object as well as a rigid object from a sequence of range images. The method can directly estimate the deformable motion parameters by solving a system of linear equations which are obtained by substituting a linear transformation of a nonrigid object expressed by a Jacobian matrix into motion constraints based on an extension of the conventional scheme used in intensity image sequences, and the range flow is obtained from the motion parameters and linear transformation. The algorithm is supported by experiments of motion estimation of a sheet of paper, a piece of cloth, the movement of human skin, and the motion of a rubber balloon being inflated using real range image sequences acquired by a video rate range finder. Furthermore, it is shown that by adding the intensity image sequence to the range information, one can prevent the equation system from falling in an ill-posed condition.>