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My name is Larry Hassebrook. I'm a Professor with Electrical and
Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky.
In 1980, I started working at IBM as an engineer and
a person by the name of Douglas Goodman got me involved in
structured light illumination, using it for 3D data acquisition.
What that is, is if you project patterns of light, kind of like a Venetian blind,
onto an object and you look at it from a different angle,
then you'll see those stripes crooked.
That crookedness or distortion we can actually mathematically convert to a three-dimensional surface.
Structured light is probably one of the best ones to use for
things that are maybe larger than a millimeter and a few
meters size. We started out scanning a single fingerprint,
and we get the 3D surface, including the ridges,
and we expanded that by licensing out and collaborating with
a company known as Flashscan 3D,
and we're actually able to achieve a full hand scan where
the entire hand, we could go and look at the 3D cross-section of the ridges.
So we could see pores, ridges, all these things.
It's an enormous amount of data. It gives you another dimension of information.
Hence, if you had a large database, say millions of people, you're less likely
to make a mistake and identify somebody that really doesn't have those fingerprints.
Where we're at right now, in terms of our main research effort,
is remote scanning. I work with Dr. Chris Begley at Transylvania,
at the University, and we've gone on several expeditions and he's taken our devices out.
Portable units, units that could be taken into a jungle, you don't need a generator.
You do need batteries, but they're very efficient.
And we've also made them so they go underwater, so we've done underwater scanning of archaeological sites.
It's a huge benefit, not just scholarly, but practically.
They're not allowed to bring that artifact out of the country to study, so with this
they can actually go into the site, scan it, and get at least the surface
information. That includes color information.
They can also use other instruments with it and combine or fuse the data.
It allows them the ability to go in, get the data, and analyze it later back at the lab.
I think the remote applications is definitely a big deal.
Full round scans, there's still big issues with 3D scanning,
in terms of just technology and practicability,
and I think having the ability to scan all the way around
without a inexpensive setup that occupies an entire lab,
I think those are still problems that we need to fix.