Small pitch fringe projection method with multiple linear fiber arrays for 3D shape measurement

3D shape measurement systems that use contactless methods are required for quality inspection of metal molds and electronic parts in industrial fields. A fringe projection method with phase-shifting method offers the advantages of high precision and high speed. Recently, since the size of electronic parts has become smaller, the pitch of a grating pattern projected onto a specimen should also become smaller. In this paper, a small pitch fringe projection method using Talbot effect with an SLD (Super luminescent diode) and a method to incline the appearing area of the fringe pattern are proposed. A linear fiber array with four cores is prototyped. A phase-shifting method using the linear fiber array is also proposed. The effectiveness is confirmed with the experimental results of shape measurement using a 3D shape measurement setup built with proposed method.

This paper presents a patented three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement system, ReCreator, which is mainly composed of two CCD cameras and a random pattern projector with fixed geometry. It can work in the binocular mode, where the stereo image pair is utilized to reconstruct the 3D point cloud in the common field of view of the two cameras; while in the monocular mode, each single camera and the random pattern projector constitute a measuring unit respectively to alleviate the highlight and occlusion effect. The design and the calibration of the random pattern projector, which is the key ingredient for enabling the system, are discussed in detail. The system algorithms are partially implemented with NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPU) in the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming environment, which proves effective to accelerate the computation. Experiments are conducted to validate the precision, rapidity and data integrity of the measurement system.

Non-sinusoidal phase error is common in structured light three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement system, thus we perform theoretical and experimental analyses of such error. The number of non-sinusoidal waveform errors in a 2\pi phase period is the same as the number of steps of the phase-shifting algorithm; no errors occur within the one-phase period. Based on our findings, a new structured light method, the linear sinusoidal phase-shifting method (LSPS), that is resistant to non-sinusoidal phase error is proposed. Experiments show that the non-sinusoidal waveform error is reduced to an almost negligible level (0.001 rad) using the proposed LSPS.

A prototype of a 3D shape measurement device with two cameras was developed, and the prototype was used to confirm the effectiveness of the 3D shape measurement method that does not require camera parameters. For 3D shape measurement using a fringe projection method, generally the pixel coordinate in the image and phase information of the projected fringe pattern are used; however, 3D coordinates can be obtained from only three fringe phase values. Recently, authors proposed this method as a feature quantity type whole-space tabulation method. There were no camera parameters required because pixel coordinates were not used, and thus a camera calibration-free 3D shape measurement can be realized. Moreover, the experimental evaluation was performed using the prototype having two cameras. Although these cameras were located at different positions and had lenses with different focal lengths, their measured shapes of an object were almost identical. An experiment of 3D shape measurement using an uncalibrated camera was performed. The effectiveness of the proposed method was quantitatively validated from experimental result obtained using the developed prototype.

3D shape measurement based on structured light system is a field of ongoing research for the past two decades. For 3D shape measurement using commercial projector and digital camera, the nonlinear gamma of the projector and the nonlinear response of the camera cause the captured fringes having both intensity and phase errors, and result in large measurement shape error. This paper presents a simple intensity error correction process for the phase-shifting method. First, a white flat board is projected with sinusoidal fringe patterns, and the intensity data is extracted from the captured image. The intensity data is fitted to an ideal sine curve. The difference between the captured curve and the fitted sine curve are used to establish an intensity look-up table (LUT). The LUT is then used to calibrate the intensities of measured object images for establishing 3D object shapes. Research results show that the measurement quality of the 3D shapes is significantly improved.

Three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement system with binary defocusing technique can perform high-speed and flexible measurements if binary fringe patterns are defocused by projector properly. However, the actual defocusing degree is difficult to set, and the fringe period is difficult to determine accordingly. In this study, we present a square-binary defocusing parameter selection framework. First, we analyze the fringe formation process mathematically. The defocusing degree is quantified and manipulated by using the focusing distance of projector, which is calibrated by point spread function measurement. To optimize parameter selection, single-point sinusoidal error is modeled as the objective function for the evaluation of the defocusing effect. We verify the correctness by using different parameter combinations and object measurements in our experiments. The appropriate defocusing parameters can be easily obtained according to the analysis of practical system setup, which improves the quality and robustness of the system.

System calibration is crucial for any 3-D shape measurement system. An accurate method is proposed to calibrate a 3-D shape measurement system based on a structured light technique. The projector is treated as a camera to unify the calibration procedures of a structured light system and a well-established stereo vision system. The key to realizing this method is to establish a highly accurate correspondence between camera pixels and projector pixels and generate digital micromirror device (DMD) image sets for projector calibration. A phase-shifting method is used to accomplish this task. A precalibrated lookup table and a linear interpolation algorithm are proposed to improve the accuracy of the generated DMD image, and accordingly improve the accuracy of the projector calibration and the 3-D measurement. Some experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the system calibration.

This paper proposes a grating projection method to measure three-dimensional profile of specular objects. This method is principally available for any reflective objects without limitation of sizes. A deformed grating pattern is observed when the reference grating is projected onto a mirror-like surface of object. This deformed pattern reflected from the surface is captured with a CCE camera and analyzed to get three-dimensional profile of the specimen. Experimental results are shown with different samples.

Three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement systems based on diffuse reflection of projected structured light do not deliver reliable data when measuring glossy, transparent, absorbent, or translucent objects. In recent years, we have developed a method based on stereo recording with infrared cameras and projection of areal aperiodic sinusoidal thermal patterns to detect such objects. However, the measurements took longer than 10 s, up to minutes; moreover, the measurement accuracy was improvable. Now, we have succeeded in both drastically reducing measurement time and significantly increasing measurement quality. This finally provides a technique for reliably measuring transparent objects, e.g., in series production. We demonstrate measurement examples achieved within 1 s and with 3D standard deviations less than 10 µm.

This paper presents a novel area-modulated phase-shifting binary method for three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement. First, the defocused triangular binary pattern is introduced to obtain the high-quality sinusoidal fringe without gamma correction. Then, the modified three steps phase-shifting algorithm which includes an average intensity image is adopted to get the wrapped phase and the object mask. After that, a multi-frequency method is used to obtain the unwrapped phase. Finally, a two-step matching method is applied to get the corresponding matching points. The experiments show that the proposed method is more precise and efficient compared with the previous methods.

Blade is the key component of the aero-engine. In generally, it requires precise size and accurate shape, so the three-dimensional shape measurement of the blade is very important. Fringe projection profilometry is generally used to measure the 3D shape of an object, because of the advantages of non-contact operation, full-field acquisition, high resolution, and fast data processing. In this paper, 3D shape measurement method based on surface structured light that combination of gray-code and phase-shift projection is proposed. The wrapped phase of the blade is got by the four-step phase-shift method. In the projection process of the gray-code, due to the ambient light, different surface reflectance and surface physical discontinuous, the edge of gray-code becomes smooth, leading to decode error, so that the gray-code pattern must be binaried before decode. Through the accurate binarization of the blade gray-code pattern, the decoding cycle of the blade is achieved, and the unwrapped phase is achieved by phase unwrapping. Then the unwrapped phase difference between the blade and reference plane is got, the height of the blade can be obtained by the relationship between the phase difference and the height. The experimental and simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve a high precision, high speed and low cost 3D shape measurement of the blade. The measurement accuracy reaches 0.03 mm. The proposed method extends the reliability and practicality of the fringe projection profilometry.

Optical fiber is a powerful element in optical communication and other optical techniques. A novel optical metrology based on optical fiber techniques is presented in this paper. The advantages of this technique provide not only the mini-type apparatus but also a simple phase-shifting method to increase the measuring accuracy. A high birefringence fiber with a beat length of 1.2 mm for phase-shifting technique is introduced. The experimental set-up and the technique principle, details will be discussed. Several application examples of optical metrology based on the optical fiber set-up are presented. The application areas include displacement measurement, 3D shape measurement and nondestructive testing. One of the important features of this advanced apparatus is its ability to apply in small object measurements for the electronic industry.

Phase Measuring Deflectometry (PMD) and Structured-Light Modulation Analysis Technique (SMAT) perform effectively in shape and defect measurements of specular objects, but the difficulty of giving consideration to accuracy and speed has also restricted the further development and application of them. Inspired by recent successes of deep learning techniques for computational imaging, we demonstrate for the first time that deep learning techniques can be used to recover high-precision modulation distributions of specular surfaces from a single-frame fringe pattern under SMAT, enabling fast and high-quality defect detection of specular surfaces. This method can also be applied to recover higher-precision phase distributions of specular surfaces from a single-frame fringe pattern under PMD, so as to realize the 3D shape measurement. In this paper, we combine depthwise separable convolution, residual structure and U-Net to build an improved U-Net network. The experimental results prove that the method has excellent performance in the phase and modulation retrieval of specular surfaces, which almost reach the accuracy of the results obtained by ten-step phase-shifting method.

Three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement based on fringe pattern projection techniques has been commonly used in various fields. One of the remaining challenges in fringe pattern projection is that camera sensor saturation may occur if there is a large range of reflectivity variation across the surface that causes measurement errors. To overcome this problem, a novel fringe pattern projection method is proposed to avoid image saturation and maintain high-intensity modulation for measuring shiny surfaces by adaptively adjusting the pixel-to-pixel projection intensity according to the surface reflectivity. First, three sets of orthogonal color fringe patterns and a sequence of uniform gray-level patterns with different gray levels are projected onto a measured surface by a projector. The patterns are deformed with respect to the object surface and captured by a camera from a different viewpoint. Subsequently, the optimal projection intensity at each pixel is determined by fusing different gray levels and transforming the camera pixel coordinate system into the projector pixel coordinate system. Finally, the adapted fringe patterns are created and used for 3D shape measurement. Experimental results on a flat checkerboard and shiny objects demonstrate that the proposed method can measure shiny surfaces with high accuracy.

The phase-coding method is useful in 3D shape measurement due to its low sensitivity to surface contrast and camera noise. However, as the number of fringe periods increases, the wrapped phase recovered from the sinusoidal phase-shifting patterns is always misaligned with the fringe order calculated by the stair-coding patterns. To solve this, an improved dual-frequency phase-coding fringe projection method is designed to realize absolute phase retrieval. Specifically, the auxiliary fringe order determined by phase-shifting is used to get the absolute phase, which can eliminate fringe-order errors. Moreover, to increase speed and the number of codewords, this paper presents a scheme that only requires seven patterns, including a uniform gray image, two high-frequency sinusoidal fringe patterns, two low-frequency sinusoidal fringe patterns and two phase-coding fringe patterns. Therefore, this method requires fewer patterns to realize high-resolution measurement than existing methods. The success of the proposed method can be proved by experiments.