Innovative calibration technique for fringe projection based 3D scanner

Abstract A new approach to 3D scanners calibration, based on Fourier Transform Profilometry method, is proposed and verified by experiments. Commonly used calibration techniques require that a calibration plane is placed in different and known positions in the scanner measuring volume; an optimization procedure iteratively change the value of some calibration parameters in order to minimize the discrepancy between the height distributions of the measured planes and the reference ones. The main limit of this type of calibration techniques is the necessity to guarantee a high accuracy in the placement of the planes used as calibration references. The innovation of the method proposed in this paper is the complete removal of any device for the accurate plane placement by assigning the task of the plane positions estimation to the camera, which is part of the scanner. The well known camera calibration algorithm proposed by Zhang permits at the same time to calibrate the camera and to estimate the positions and orientations of the plane used for the calibration itself. The knowledge of the plane position allows to use them as a reference of the scanner calibration. The obtained results show that this method provides accuracy values for the scanner parameters estimation comparable with other calibration techniques, but the advantage is that no particular device is needed.