Fast and robust range data acquisition in a low-cost environment

TLDR: This paper shows that the necessary computational burden to compute range values by means of active triangulation techniques can be reduced drastically by introducing weak geometrical constraints for the projector camera configurations.

Abstract: It has been shown earlier that efficient active triangulation methods for range data acquisition can be devised by employing an appropriate time-space encoding. In this paper we show that the necessary computational burden to compute range values by means of these techniques can be reduced drastically by introducing weak geometrical constraints for the projector camera configurations. Furthermore, we suggest the concept of a virtual measurement coordinate system reducing the triangulation to simple one-dimensional LUT operations. Thus, the range acquisition technique can be implemented very fast in a low cost PC based image processing environment. We show how to calibrate the system and give some experimental results.