A three-dimensional measurement method for medical electric endoscope

One method for three-dimensional (3D) measurement based on structured light is proposed for the medical electric endoscope in the present study. The structured light of black and white strips is generated by that the point sources illuminate the grating mask plate. Four point sources are aligned linearly by a certain space and they are lighted sequentially. Then four images of modulated fringes by the height of object with different phase shifts can be obtained. The algorithm proposed by Wang Z is employed to extract the accurate phase shift from the fringe images since the phase shift cannot be exactly set as p/2 by hardware. An experimental prototype endoscope was built according to the proposed method. One high-definition CMOS camera module developed by ourselves was used to acquire the endoscopic images and the structured light was generated by four fiber LEDs and a transmission grating with a pitch of 0.1 mm. one C# program was designed to light up LEDs in turn, acquire the phase shifted images and calculate the 3D information. The experimental results indicate that its precise of depth measurement at the working distance of 40 mm is better than 0.5 mm and its consuming time of 3D depth calculation is less than 0.5 s.