Realtime Structured Light Vision with the Principle of Unique Color Codes

To date, several successful structured light vision systems for accurate 3D measurement in machine vision have been set up. However, these are usually limited to scanning stationary objects or static environments since tens of images have to be captured for recovering one 3D scene, which results in the industry largely avoiding this technology. This paper presents a method of grid-pattern design based on the principles of uniquely color-encoded structured light, to improve the reconstruction efficiency for real-time processing. For a live scene, the 3D measurement is desired to only capture a single image. To realize this, an important problem for the color-encoded projection is the unique indexing of the color codes in the image. It is essential that each light grid be uniquely identified by incorporating the local neighborhoods in the pattern so that 3D reconstruction can be performed with only local analysis of a single image. This paper describes such a method in the design of the special grid patterns and its corresponding 3D reconstruction method for fast vision perception.