A unified-calibration method in FTP-based 3D data acquisition for reverse engineering

Reverse engineering plays an important role in product design and manufacturing due to the need for the improvement of existing products. Acquisition of 3D data of existing products is one of the most fundamental processes in reverse engineering. This paper proposes a unified-calibration method for Fourier Transform Profilometry (FTP)-based 3D data acquisition. In current FTP methods, the system parameters, such as positions and orientations of the camera and projector and the reference plane location, are needed to convert the phase map into 3D coordinates of the object. Generally, it is difficult to measure these parameters directly. Therefore, a calibration procedure is required in current FTP methods. In this research, a novel method is proposed for the calibration. Only one image is used to calculate all system parameters in the proposed method. The experiments show the method is simple and feasible for FTP-based 3D data acquisition.