High-speed 3D shape measurement using Fourier transform and stereo vision

Background: In the fast 3D shape measurement, it is an important factor to use the least number of fringe patterns to get the wrapped phase and the wrapped phase is always required to be retrieved to absolute phase. But the process of phase unwrapping may affect the quality of absolute phase. Besides absolute phase retrieval is time-costing especially for high-speed 3D shape measurement. Methods: This paper proposes a fast measurement method based on Fourier transform profilometry and stereo vision. Because of the property of stereo vision, every point can find its corresponding point in the wrapped phase. This method can reconstruct 3D surface without phase unwrapping. In order to further increase the measurement speed and overcome the gamma effect of projector, the dithering fringe pattern is used. To resist false matching, the original image matching constraint gives a rough parallax. Phase matching and sub-pixel parallax optimization are used to reduce the matching errors. In order to confirm the phase value of points which are at the edge of wrapped phase, average phase value is calculated. Results: A white mask is measured based on the proposed method. The results from every step show the effect of different functions. To better show the effect of the proposed method, a white house is measured and the measurement is compared with LSSM and MFH. In order to further to show the advantage of the proposed method, discontinuous blocks and continuous blocks are measured. The average height, RMS, average error, maximum error are compared with the method which uses absolute phase to match the corresponding points. Experiment results verify the feasibility of the proposed method and it can measure complex objects with high speed and accuracy. Conclusion: This paper uses Fourier transform and stereo vision to get wrapped phase and reconstruct 3D shape without phase unwrapping. The proposed method contains three part: phase matching, edge points detection and sub-pixel parallax optimization. By comparing matching precision, the proposed method can get high quality surface. Because the process of measurement only need one frame of deformed fringe pattern to get the wrapped phase and the matching process does not need phase unwrapping, the proposed method has the potential to be used in fast measurement.