High-speed active 3D acquisition based on a pattern-specific mesh

This paper presents a high-speed, single shot range scanner. The depth acquisition is based on classical triangulation, facilitated by structured light. The projection pattern consists of equidistant vertical stripes. The major contribution of our research is that this setup is amenable to real-time processing. Both from an algorithmic and an implementation point of view, the speed constraint is taken into account. The paper discusses both the pattern detection and the camera and projector calibration. The subpixel accurate detection, which is the main computational problem, is implemented as a two-stage algorithm. An initialization procedure yields the rough contours. Subpixel accuracy is reached through an iterative relaxation process. A consistent labeling is assigned based on belief propagation.