Fast three-dimensional measurements for dynamic scenes with shiny surfaces

This paper presents a novel fringe projection technique for fast three-dimensional (3-D) shape measurements of moving highly reflective objects. By combining the standard three-step phase-shifting fringe patterns with a digital speckle image, dynamic 3-D reconstructions of shiny surfaces can be efficiently achieved with only four projected patterns. The phase measurement is performed by three-step phase-shifting algorithm as it uses the theoretical minimum number of fringe patterns for phase-shifting profilometry. To avoid the camera saturation, a dual-camera fringe projection system is built to measure shiny objects from two different directions. The erroneous phase obtained from a saturated pixel is corrected by the phase of its corresponding pixel in the other view which is free from the saturation problem. To achieve high measurement accuracy, the corresponding high light intensity areas in cameras are found by sub-pixel matches of the speckle pattern in either view. Benefited from the trifocal tensor constraint, the corresponding points in the two wrapped phase maps can be directly established, and thus, the difficulties in determining the correct fringe order for the discontinuous or isolated surfaces can be effectively bypassed. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is able to successfully measure highly reflective surfaces for both stationary and dynamic scenes.