Automatic window size selection in Windowed Fourier Transform for 3D reconstruction using adapted mother wavelets

Fringe pattern analysis in coded structured light constitutes an active field of research. Techniques based on first projecting a sinusoidal pattern and then recovering the phase deviation permit the computation of the phase map and its corresponding depth map, leading to a dense acquisition of the measuring object. Among these techniques, the ones based on time-frequency analysis permit to extract the depth map from a single image, thus having potential applications measuring moving objects. The main techniques are Fourier Transform (FT), Windowed Fourier Transform (WFT) and Wavelet Transform (WT). This paper first analyzes the pros and cons of these three techniques, then a new algorithm for the automatic selection of the window size in WFT is proposed. This algorithm is compared to the traditional WT using adapted mother wavelet signals both with simulated and real objects, showing the performance results for quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the new method. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.