3D shape measurement technique for multiple rapidly moving objects

Recently proposed binary defocusing techniques have led to ultrafast speed 3D shape measurement, but they are generally limited to measurement of a single object at a time. Introducing additional gray coded patterns for point-by-point phase unwrapping could permit simultaneous multiple-object measurement. However, when the objects are moving rapidly, the displacement between the first captured pattern and the last can be significant, and pose challenges related to the precisely designed gray codes. This paper presents a new phase unwrapping strategy that combines the conventional spatial phase unwrapping with the gray code to resolve motion related phase unwrapping problems. A system with a speed of 5,000 Hz was developed to verify the performance of the proposed technique. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America