Simultaneous Bi-directional Structured Light Encoding for Practical Uncalibrated Profilometry

Torben Fetzer, Gerd Reis, Didier Stricker

Abstract: Profilometry based on structured light is one of the most popular methods for 3D reconstruction. It is widely used when high-precision and dense models, for a variety of different objects, are required. User-friendly procedures encode the scene in horizontal and vertical directions, which allows a unique description of points in the scene. The resulting encoding, can be used to auto-calibrate the devices used. Thus, any consumer or industrial cameras or projectors can be supported and the procedure is not limited to pre-calibrated setups. This approach is extremely flexible, but requires a large number of camera acquisitions of the scene with multiple patterns projected. This paper presents a new approach that encodes the scene simultaneously in horizontal and vertical directions using sinusoidal fringe patterns. This allows to almost halve the number of recorded images, making the approach attractive again for many practical applications with time aspects.