Fast 3D object recognition using multiple color coded illumination

The acquisition and measurement of two- and three-dimensional contours of objects are important tasks in modern production processes and quality control. Specially, nontactile methods like optical triangulation and the digital image processing are becoming more and more important. Color image processing in combination with color coded illumination could be used to realize new methods of nontactile 3D-object ranging. Two of these methods are the color-coded triangulation and the color-coded phase-shift method. We use a combination of these two methods to realize a fast 3D-object ranging with unambiguous results. The color-coded phase-shift method is able to reach a good spatial resolution, but the measured range values are ambiguous. Using color-coded triangulation an unambiguous three-dimensional image could be achieved, but compared to the color-coded phase-shift method, the spatial resolution is poor. Since both methods are able to generate a 3D-object description by processing only a single RGB-image, it is possible to combine these two methods.