Material Image Capture Guide for Portable Data Alignment
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Solution Overview
Problem
Designers face challenges in collaboratively capturing and sharing material data due to the lack of portable and accurate methods for capturing material information, leading to difficulties in understanding material attributes and their interactions in product creation, especially when working remotely.
Innovation Solution
A material data collection system using a handheld device and capture guide to convert real-world materials into high-quality digital assets, aligning and correcting images for proper orientation, lighting, and metadata capture, enabling easy sharing and retrieval.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If a flatbed scanner is used to capture material data, then the captured images have good quality, but the device is not portable and requires the user to go to the scanner
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses a handheld device with camera to capture images of materials, creating a portable copying solution that replicates the functionality of a flatbed scanner while enabling mobility. The captured images are then processed to achieve quality comparable to scanner output.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the mechanical flatbed scanner system with an optical-handheld camera system combined with digital image processing. This substitution enables portability while maintaining image quality through computational corrections for lighting, alignment, and lens aberrations.
2Loss of information
If manufacturer descriptions are used to represent materials, then basic information is provided, but the information lacks specificity and consistency
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates accurate visual copies of materials through standardized photography and processes the images to preserve true colors, patterns, and textures. This visual copying approach provides more specific and consistent material representation than textual descriptions alone.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms material representation from textual parameters (manufacturer descriptions) to visual parameters (processed images with corrected color, lighting, and alignment). This parameter transformation enables more precise and consistent material identification and comparison.
3Ease of operation
If a handheld device is used to capture material data, then portability is improved, but lens aberrations and alignment issues affect image quality
Solution Approach 1:
The patent converts the harmful effects of lens aberrations and alignment issues into beneficial learning data. By capturing images with known alignment markers and lighting conditions, the system learns distortion patterns and applies inverse transformations to correct the images, turning portability-induced errors into correctable artifacts.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements feedback loops where captured images are analyzed for alignment and lighting conditions, corrections are applied based on this analysis, and the results are used to refine subsequent captures. This iterative feedback process maintains image quality despite the portability of the handheld device.
Data Source
AI summary
A material data collection system allows capturing of material data. For example, the material data collection system may include digital image data for materials. The material data collection system may ensure that captured digital image data is properly aligned, so that material data may be easily recalled for later use, while maintaining the proper alignment for the captured digital image. The material data collection system may include using a capture guide, to provide cues on how to orient a mobile device used with the material data collection system.