Color phase-shifting technique for three-dimensional shape measurement

A color phase-shifting technique has been recently developed for high-speed 3-D shape measurement. In this technique, three sinusoidal phase-shifted images used for a measurement cycle in a traditional grayscale phase-shifting technique are encoded into one color image. Therefore, only a single color image is needed for reconstructing the 3-D surface shape of an object. The measurement speed can then be increased up to the frame rate of the camera. However, previous experimental results showed that the measurement accuracy of this technique was initially low, due largely to the coupling and imbalance of color channels. In this paper, two solutions, one software-based and one hardware-based, are proposed to compensate for these errors. Experimental results show that the second solution - modification of the camera together with an imbalance compensation algorithm - would effectively reduce the errors and produce better measurement results than the software-based compensation method. This technique has many potential applications in high-speed measurement, such as highway inspection and dynamic measurement of human body. (c) 2006 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.