Single-Shot 3D Sensing Close to Physical Limits and Information Limits

This thesis discusses the physical and information theoretical limits of optical 3D metrology, and, based on these principal considerations, introduces a novel single-shot 3D video camera that works close to these limits. There are serious obstacles for a "perfect" 3D-camera: The author explains that it is impossible to achieve a data density better than one third of the available video pixels. Available single-shot 3D cameras yet display much lower data density, because there is one more obstacle: The object surface must be "encoded" in a non-ambiguous way, commonly by projecting sophisticated patterns. However, encoding devours space-bandwidth and reduces the output data density. The dissertation explains how this profound dilemma of 3D metrology can be solved, exploiting just two synchronized video cameras and a static projection pattern.