Optical Measurement of Highly Reflective Surfaces From a Single Exposure

Three-dimensional structured light (SL) measurement of highly reflective surface is a challenge faced in industrial metrology. The high dynamic range (HDR) technique provides a solution by fusing images under multiple exposures; however, the process is highly time-consuming. This article reports a new SL-based method to measure parts with highly reflective surfaces from only a single exposure. A new quantitative metric is defined to optimally select camera exposure for capturing input single-exposure images. Different from existing image gradient or entropy-based metrics, the new metric incorporates both intensity modulation and overexposure. A skip pyramid context aggregation network (SP-CAN) is proposed to enhance the single exposure-captured images. Compared with existing image enhancement methods, SP-CAN effectively preserves detailed encoded phase information near edges and corners during enhancement. Experiments with various industrial parts demonstrated that the average time cost of the proposed method was 0.6 s, which was only one tenth of the HDR method (ten exposures), and the two methods achieved similar coverage rates (97.6% versus 98.0%) and measurement accuracy (0.040 mm versus 0.038 mm).

Automated summary

This article introduces a new SL-based method for measuring parts with highly reflective surfaces in industrial metrology, which significantly reduces measurement time. A new quantitative metric is defined for optimal camera exposure selection, and a SP-CAN network is proposed for image enhancement. Experimental results show that the new method has lower time cost and high measurement accuracy.