Three-dimensional shape measurement technique for shiny surfaces by adaptive pixel-wise projection intensity adjustment

Conventional methods based on analyses of the absolute gray levels of pixels in fringe pattern images are affected by the problems of image saturation, interreflection, and high sensitivity to noise when obtaining three-dimensional (3D) shape measurements of shiny surfaces. This study presents a robust, adaptive, and fast 3D shape measurement technique, which adaptively adjusts the pixel-wise intensity of the projected patterns, thus it avoids image saturation and has a high signal to noise ratio (SNR) during 3D shape measurement for shiny surfaces. Compared with previous time-consuming methods using multiple exposures and the projection of fringe patterns with multiple intensities, where a large number of fringe pattern images need to be captured, the proposed technique needs to capture far fewer pattern images for measurement. In addition, it can greatly reduce the time costs to obtain the optimal projection intensities by the fusion of uniform gray level patterns and coordinates mapping. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique can achieve highly accurate and efficient 3D shape measurement for shiny surfaces.