Removing harmonic distortion of measurements of a defocusing three-step phase-shifting digital fringe projection system

Binary defocusing method was adopted in 3D profilometry as it allows real-time measurement and does not need to handle the luminance nonlinearity of a projector. Current patch-based binary fringe patterns are periodic and carry strong harmonic distortion as compared with the ideal sinusoidal fringe patterns, which affects the measuring performance remarkably. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating aperiodic fringe patterns based on optimized patches. The produced fringe patterns can significantly lower the noise floor and suppress the harmonic distortion in the constructed phase map. Accordingly, the achieved depth measuring performance can be significantly improved. Special care is also taken during the optimization of the patches in our framework such that the depth measuring performance is robust to fringe period and defocusing extent.