High Speed Sequential Illumination With Electronic Rolling Shutter Cameras

Matis Hudon, Paul Kerbiriou, Arno Schubert, Kadi Bouatouch; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2015, pp. 66-73

Nowadays flashes are commonly used in photography: they bring light and sharpness to images. It is very tempting to use flash lights in cinema, to take profit of controlled light as photographers may do. But using flashes with video recording is not as easy as in photography. Actually, flashes cause many temporal artifacts in video recordings, especially with high speed CMOS cameras equipped with electronic rolling shutters. This paper proposes a video recording method that uses periodic strobbed illumination sources together with any electronic rolling shutter camera, even without any synchronization device between the camera and the controlled lights. The objective is to avoid recording artifacts by controlling the timings and periods of the flash lights, and then reconstructing images using rows that correspond to the same flash instant. We will show that our method can be easily applied to photometric stereo.