Accurate calibration method for a structured light system

System calibration is crucial for any 3-D shape measurement system. An accurate method is proposed to calibrate a 3-D shape measurement system based on a structured light technique. The projector is treated as a camera to unify the calibration procedures of a structured light system and a well-established stereo vision system. The key to realizing this method is to establish a highly accurate correspondence between camera pixels and projector pixels and generate digital micromirror device (DMD) image sets for projector calibration. A phase-shifting method is used to accomplish this task. A precalibrated lookup table and a linear interpolation algorithm are proposed to improve the accuracy of the generated DMD image, and accordingly improve the accuracy of the projector calibration and the 3-D measurement. Some experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the system calibration. (c) 2008 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.