A 3D shape measurement system based on random pattern projection

Abstract

This paper presents a patented three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement system, ReCreator, which is mainly composed of two CCD cameras and a random pattern projector with fixed geometry. It can work in the binocular mode, where the stereo image pair is utilized to reconstruct the 3D point cloud in the common field of view of the two cameras; while in the monocular mode, each single camera and the random pattern projector constitute a measuring unit respectively to alleviate the highlight and occlusion effect. The design and the calibration of the random pattern projector, which is the key ingredient for enabling the system, are discussed in detail. The system algorithms are partially implemented with NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPU) in the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming environment, which proves effective to accelerate the computation. Experiments are conducted to validate the precision, rapidity and data integrity of the measurement system. © 2010 IEEE.