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Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

Summary

This study addresses the shape-prior shortcut problem in learning-based long-range single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP). Using mechanistic interpretability and conformal uncertainty quantification, the authors diagnose that UNet baselines rely on object-boundary shape priors rather than fringe-phase decoding. They propose PhiCalNet, which outputs wrapped phase and applies a differentiable calibration layer, reducing object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm and confirming architecture as the key factor.

SourcearXiv Machine LearningAuthor: Adam Haroon, Anush Lakshman, Cody Fleming, Beiwen Li
Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry
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[2606.17093] Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

[Submitted on 13 Jun 2026]

Title:Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

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Abstract:Learning-based single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) has been studied mostly at close range. The long-range regime (standoff beyond 1 m) remains largely unaddressed: inverse-square intensity falloff lowers fringe signal-to-noise ratio and degrades physical ground truth, the single-shot problem is ill-posed because fringe-order information is absent from one image, and these architectures have not been studied mechanistically. We present a diagnose-repair-verify study using mechanistic interpretability (MI) and conformal uncertainty quantification (UQ) as convergent diagnostics: they agree on one physical failure locus, driving and verifying an architectural repair. On a photorealistic synthetic benchmark (15,600 fringe images, 50 objects at 1.5-2.1 m), a best UNet baseline reaches 14.54 mm object mean absolute error (MAE). Three probes (linear probing, Grad-CAM, flat-plane out-of-distribution test) converge: the baseline solves the task via object-boundary shape priors rather than fringe-phase decoding. We repair this with PhiCalNet, which outputs wrapped phase rather than depth and applies a fixed differentiable calibration layer mapping phase to depth, removing the shape-prior solution from the hypothesis space architecturally rather than by a loss penalty. A physics-informed loss that enforces the same physics as a soft penalty on a depth-regressing network yields no measurable gain, isolating the architecture as the operative factor. PhiCalNet reduces object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm; the residual is carried by 0.103% of pixels at the +/-pi wrap discontinuity. Pixel-wise conformal UQ confirms the diagnosis: rejecting the top 5% of object pixels by snapshot disagreement cuts PhiCalNet RMSE by 64% (20.6->7.4 mm) versus 3.5% for the baseline. MI and UQ converge on the same failure locus.

Comments: 44 pages, 27 figures

Subjects:

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)

Cite as: arXiv:2606.17093 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.17093v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.17093

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Adam Haroon [view email] [v1] Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:17:06 UTC (25,375 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • Long-range single-shot FPP suffers from low SNR and ill-posedness; models often exploit shape-prior shortcuts
  • Mechanistic interpretability and conformal UQ diagnose UNet baseline's reliance on boundary shape priors
  • PhiCalNet removes shape prior architecturally, reducing object MAE from 14.54 mm to 4.46 mm
  • Conformal UQ confirms diagnosis; rejecting top 5% uncertain pixels cuts RMSE by 64% for PhiCalNet

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Diagnosing and Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry | AI News Hub