Real-time and high-resolution 3D imaging system using light-section method and smart CMOS sensor

This paper presents the first real-time 3D imaging system based on the light-section method with VGA pixel resolution. A 3D measurement system has a wide variety of applications fields, however it is difficult for the conventional imaging systems to realize a real-time and high-resolution 3D measurement based on the light-section method since it requires a lot of frames per range map to acquire the positions of a scanning laser beam. Our developed image sensor achieves 41.7k fps position detection of a projected sheet beam in 640 /spl times/ 480 pixel resolution. An integrated system controller implemented on an FPGA performs sensor control, light projection control, range data pre-processing and suppression of redundant data transmission for the fatal problems of the real-time system. Our developed 3D imaging system achieves 23.3 range maps/s with 0.87 mm range accuracy at a distance of 1200 mm.

[1]  S. Yoshimura,et al.  A 48 kframe/s CMOS image sensor for real-time 3-D sensing and motion detection , 2001, 2001 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers. ISSCC (Cat. No.01CH37177).

[2]  W. Brockherde,et al.  A CMOS photosensor array for 3D imaging using pulsed laser , 2001, 2001 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers. ISSCC (Cat. No.01CH37177).

[3]  Peter Gulden,et al.  Novel opportunities for optical level gauging and 3D-imaging with the photoelectronic mixing device , 2002, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas..

[4]  H. Sumi,et al.  A 1/4-inch QVGA color imaging and 3-D sensing CMOS sensor with analog frame memory , 2002, 2002 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers (Cat. No.02CH37315).

[5]  M. Ikeda,et al.  640/spl times/480 Real-time range finder using high-speed readout scheme and column-parallel position detector , 2003, 2003 Symposium on VLSI Circuits. Digest of Technical Papers (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37408).

[6]  Andreas Ullrich,et al.  Long-range high-performance time-of-flight-based 3D imaging sensors , 2002, Proceedings. First International Symposium on 3D Data Processing Visualization and Transmission.

[7]  V. Brajovic,et al.  100 frames/s CMOS range image sensor , 2001, 2001 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers. ISSCC (Cat. No.01CH37177).

[8]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  CCD-based range-finding sensor , 1997 .

[9]  B. Mansoorian,et al.  A high speed, 500 frames/s, 1024/spl times/1024 CMOS active pixel sensor , 1999, 1999 Symposium on VLSI Circuits. Digest of Papers (IEEE Cat. No.99CH36326).