Three-dimensional vision from a multisensing mechanism

An approach for sensing a three-dimensional (3D) object surface with an arbitrary geometric shape is presented. Combining two different 3D sensing mechanisms, point-array encoding based on affine transformation and fringe encoding based on phase mapping, we construct a mathematic model for 3D vision in which the point-array encoding is initially applied to determine the fringe orders to create a control-vertex mesh with absolute coordinate values in 3D space. Then phase evaluation and phase unwrapping for fringe decoding is performed under the guidance of control-vertex mesh, leading to an absolute phase map and the corresponding range image of the test object. The computer simulations and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the theoretical prediction. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.