High-Speed and Low-Latency 3D Sensing with a Parallel-Bus Pattern

High-speed 3D shape sensing is an essential technology for three-dimensional recognition and manipulation in dynamic scenes. However, conventional high-speed sensing methods mainly focus on the image capturing speed and the actual processing time to obtain a point cloud is not optimized in the measurement scheme and sensing pattern configuration. On the other hand, measurement latency is critical to respond in real-time and physically handle the dynamic scenes. This paper introduces a physically stereo-rectified projector-camera system for high-speed and low-latency 3D sensing with fast sequential memory access in the decoding process. Moreover, we configure a structured light pattern named “Parallel-bus pattern” with a De Bruijn torus and clock lines to maximize information density and robustly decode the pattern as data transfer in a parallel bus interface. We measured dynamically moving and deforming objects with the proposed system and evaluated the measurement performance. As a result, the developed 3D sensing system with the parallel-bus pattern achieved 27K-points measurement at higher than 1000 fps with 0.336 ms latency and 0.838 mm accuracy on average.