Positioning Quadric Surfaces in all Active Stereo Imaging System

The location of surfaces using stereo imaging techniques is an important area of research for robot guidance and machine inspection applications, The underlying geometry of finite focal length stereo pinhole cameras is investigated. This is the model used in both active and passive stereo imaging systems. It is shown that the points of intersecting views from the pinhole models result in conic sections. This information is used to locate quadric surfaces in the inspection space. When the projected fringe pattern is encoded to a quadric surface, the underlying intersection mapping can be used to estimate the position of the surface. Subsets of most smooth objects can be fitted to a conic section. For inspection of smooth surfaces with projection moire techniques, this fringe interpretation method would allow for correct placement of the object. >