Week 6: Testing and Evaluating The Prototype

Given that the code prototype was finished last week and the hardware prototype was finished the week before that (until the rangefinder broke and got replaced) the last week was dedicated to testing and evaluating of the prototype and deciding what we would do differently if we were to do this project again.

First of all we did a scan of Fabio in the library. Apologies for the bad audio quality, the laptop we recorded this on was throwing a fit.

From this we were able to conclude a few things about the current prototype. It does not produce a high fidelity scan and is prone to artifacting depending on the properties of the surface being scanned. However the prototype did manage to produce a scan that showed a rough outline of what was scanned. This leads us to believe that with a sensor that has a greater range the project could actually be usable to produce accurate scans.

In order to validate our results we carried out multiple scans at varying distances from the target being scanned and got some interesting results. The scans taken from further away produced more accurate shape silhouettes with less distortion but far less depth resolution which also made them very vulnerable to any artifacting that occurred. This further validated our theory that a sensor with a greater range would produce better results as it would be able to maintain depth resolution while not being susceptible to fish-eye distortion.

We also tested scans very close up to the target object. This produced highly distorted scan images to the point where objects were unrecognisable due to how extreme the fisheye distortion effect was.