An accurate and robust strip-edge based structured light means for shiny surface micro-measurement in 3D

3D measurement of shiny or reflective surface is a challenging issue for optical based instrumentations. In this article, we present a novel structured light approach for direct measurement of shiny target so as to skip the coating pre-procedure. In comparison with traditional image intensity based structured light coding strategies like sinusoidal and line patterns, strip edges not raw image intensities are encoded in the illuminated patterns. With strip edges generally better preserved than individual image intensity in the image data in the presence of surface reflections, such a coding strategy is more robust. To remove the periodic ambiguity within strip patterns, traditional Gray code patterns are adopted. To localize the strip edges more precisely, both positive and negative strip patterns are used. An improved zero-crossing feature detector that has sub-pixel accuracy is proposed for strip edge localization. The experimental setup is configured with merely an off-the-shelf pico-projector and a camera. Extensive experiments including accuracy evaluation, comparison with previous structured light algorithms and the reconstruction of some real shiny objects are shown to demonstrate the system’s accuracy and endurance against reflective nature of surfaces.