Dark surfaces: weak return, unstable measurement

Dark plastics, rubber, carbon fibre, matte black coatings. Sparse, noisy or absent data

Published measurements Root cause: Low reflectance LUC-VISION™

Why it fails, and why we are not bound by it

Matte black surfaces can reflect only a few percent of the light. That is one to two orders of magnitude less than light surfaces, and intensity-based methods lose signal-to-noise ratio quickly. In coherent detection, the signal amplitude scales with the product of the return amplitude and the local oscillator amplitude. We set the local oscillator power. We can therefore capture dark and light parts with one set of parameters.

Measured evidence

Digital content Scale, mixed materials, organic curvature

Full-body human scan

100,000 raw points

Digital content Fine fibers, saturated color

RGBD capture of a plush surface

674,633 raw points

Assess whether this fits your part

Describe the material, size and measurement requirement, or ship a sample to the lab. We will assess feasibility.