Range finder using circular dynamic stereo

A new three-dimensional measuring system that uses a single TV camera is introduced. By introducing coupled mirrors on the TV camera lens, measuring points which appear on the image plane are displaced according to the depth. Upon rotating the coupled mirrors at high speed during the TV camera exposure, these measuring points are shifted and appeared to be circular streaks on an image plane. Since the size of a circular streak is inversely proportional to the depth from the TV camera, the depth can be measured easily by processing the circular image. In this paper, the measurement of tracer particle position in the flow is introduced as one of the applications of our system.