Color-coded binary fringe projection technique for 3-D shape measurement

Color coding has been used for 3-D shape measurement in many recently developed fringe projection techniques. Use of color allows for more information to be coded in the same number of patterns as compared to the black-and-white techniques. However, one major problem of using color is that the appearance of the color fringe patterns projected onto the object can be affected by the color of the object surface itself. Thus, correctly decoding the fringe patterns can be difficult and sometimes even impossible. We describe a color-coded binary fringe projection technique that solves this problem. The use of an adaptive threshold scheme enables the extraction of the 3-D information and texture of an object without being affected by the color of the object surface. The development of a color gray-code concept, which is an extension of the gray-code technique, further reduces decoding errors. In addition, this technique can be used to measure objects with discontinuous features. The system has small digitizing errors and its measurement accuracy is hardly affected by system noise and nonlinearity errors. The system setup, color pattern design, shape reconstruction, and experimental results are presented. (c) 2005 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.