Automated photogrammetric surface reconstruction with structured light

Structured light is a flexible method which is often used for the measurement of surfaces without natural texture. A basic difficulty herein is the solution of the correspondence problem, which often leads to ambiguities due to high spatial frequencies of the projected patterns or discontinuities in the object. The method presented here is based on the projection of a very dense dot pattern and three or more images of the object rather than a stereo pair, and it offers a reliable establishment of correspondences without requiring any approximate values or an initial match established by a human operator like some other systems do. This paper gives an overview of the hardware setup and the chain of processing; results are shown from deformation measurements of a carbon wing panel under load and from the determination of the surface of a model car.