Data-Driven Laser Plane Optimization for High-Precision Numerical Calibration of Line Structured Light Sensors

Line structured light sensor has been applied in various three dimensional (3D) measurement scenes with the advantages of non-contact, low cost and high speed. Its accuracy, which is directly determined by the calibration method, needs to be further improved to fulfill the measuring tasks of precision parts. Here, we proposed a numerical method that can eliminate the errors of the model based methods through two strategies. One is the establishment of the numerical mapping relationship between stripe pixel coordinates and their world coordinates through piecewise cubic interpolation. Corner points of a checkerboard target are used to obtain sufficient interpolating nodes. This target can be manually aligned with the laser plane and the alignment error would be eliminated via the point projection. The other is the data-driven laser plane optimization. The data set of reference interval distance is computed based on the invariance of cross ratio. The optimization model is to minimize the root mean squared error of measured interval distances by adjusting the laser plane coefficients. After the optimization, a higher numerical mapping relationship can be achieved. It bypasses the camera and the distortion models and reaches a calibration error of only 0.005mm. The comparison studies and the measurement of the steps further validate the proposed method.