Flexible and accurate implementation of a binocular structured light system

Abstract This paper presents a practical implementation of a binocular system for three-dimensional (3D) surface measurement. Manufacturing procedures are easy to implement because this system does not require that the optical axes of two cameras’ lenses be coplanar and the structured light sheets be perpendicular to that plane. The method of structured light calibration is proposed to obtain the parameters of the structured light sheets. This calibration method can tolerate the surface condition of the calibration board. To eliminate the effect caused by the distortion of projector lens, each structured light sheet is fitted to a conicoid. Meanwhile, data acquired from two cameras are transformed into a unique coordinate system to avoid 3D data matching. Experiments are conducted to validate the flexibility, accuracy, and desirability of our system.