A Coded Light Approach for Depth Map Acquisition

The Coded Light Approach is a technique to measure surface depth values in 3D coordinate space with modest device and computational cost. The burdensome correspondence analysis encountered in stereo vision or structured light techniques is avoided by projecting Gray code patterns sequentially onto the surfaces to be measured, and capturing the corresponding deformed code patterns with a camera. The captured code patterns are stored sequentially into subsequent bit planes of an image memory. After illumination and capture, each cell in image memory marks uniquely the corresponding illumination point in the projector image plane, and thus triangulation or depth calculation can be performed immediately by simple table look-up operations.