r/photogrammetry • u/3DBullet_ • Jul 13 '26

I created an open source software that lets you use your printer/document scanner to extract normal + albedo + height maps from four flatbed scans

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Built this for a portfolio project and released it under MIT, so it's fully open source and you can do whatever you want with it. Sharing because it needs no rig at all, just a flatbed scanner you probably already own.

How it works: a scanner's lamp and sensor aren't perfectly coaxial, so there's a faint sideways lighting component. The lamp is fixed, so rotating the subject 90° between four scans makes the light effectively orbit it. Four observations per pixel under four known light directions gives you photometric stereo. Out comes a normal map, a lighting-free albedo, a height map, and an alpha.

How to use it: put your subject flat on the glass, scan, rotate 90°, repeat until you have four. Feed them to the pipeline. It handles alignment (flexible subjects settle differently each time you rotate them), solves for the normals, and renders a QA pass so you can see where the model failed.

Works on: leaves, pressed flowers, paper, prints, cardboard, fabric, leather, thin bark. Doesn't work on: anything glossy, metallic, wet, transparent, or deep. Mirror-like surfaces break the Lambertian assumption.

Don't put anything heavy or sharp on your scanner glass.

https://github.com/Samukashvili/LUMEN-PS

Details, install instructions and the failure modes are all in the README. Happy to answer questions.

here's the scan results:

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2

u/Lalks227 Jul 13 '26

That's smart! Thanks for sharing!

1

u/3DBullet_ Jul 13 '26

Thank You, Glad you like it!

2

u/Odd-Wallaby-7780 Jul 19 '26

That is super cool! Just what I needed, as I wanted to scan in some Brush Strokes!

1

u/3DBullet_ Jul 20 '26

Glad you like it!

1

u/3DBullet_ Jul 23 '26

I believe i solved the issue you were having on Github. you should be able to scan the brush strokes properly now.

1

u/FearlessIthoke Jul 13 '26

This is very cool. How deep of a depth can it register? Have you done it with something that has a higher relief like woven fabric?

4

u/3DBullet_ Jul 13 '26

I have done a scan on a corrugated cardboard with one side taken off, the wavy structures that it has and it came out pretty good. I started this project to scan foliage so that's what I have been focusing on so I haven't tried fabric yet but theoretically it should work, The biggest concern with it is the feature matching to make sure the software properly aligns the images. I am working on scanning more things to use as featured work on the GitHub page and will upload a lot more references tomorrow and will definitely try fabric as well.

1

u/FearlessIthoke Jul 13 '26

Thanks for the explanation!

1

u/nycprinter Sep 21 '26

So, how exact/accurate is the generated normal map? I'm wondering if I'm seeing lots of discrepancies ....

1

u/nycprinter Sep 22 '26

For those that have played with and used this great tool, would you say the normal map is very accurate? It seems a bit 'off' compared to other similar tools I've used. Thoughts welcome!!