Optimised De Bruijn patterns for one-shot shape acquisition

Coded structured light is an optical technique based on active stereovision which allows shape acquisition. By projecting a suitable set of light patterns onto the surface of an object and capturing images with a camera, a large number of correspondences can be found and 3D points can be reconstructed by means of triangulation. One-shot techniques are based on projecting an unique pattern so that moving objects can be measured. A major group of techniques in this field define coloured multi-slit or stripe patterns in order to obtain dense reconstructions. The former type of patterns is suitable for locating intensity peaks in the image while the latter is aimed to locate edges. In this paper, we present a new way to design coloured stripe patterns so that both intensity peaks and edges can be located without loss of accuracy and reducing the number of hue levels included in the pattern. The results obtained by the new pattern are quantitatively and qualitatively compared to similar techniques. These results also contribute to a comparison between the peak-based and edge-based reconstruction strategies. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.