Invalid point removal method based on error energy function in fringe projection profilometry

Abstract

Invalid points, such as shadow and background, in the captured fringe patterns of fringe projection profilometry (FPP) are often inevitable due to the limited field of view measurements of three-dimensional (3D) imaging equipment. To ensure the quality of 3D reconstruction data, these invalid points must be identified and removed. FPP captures co-frequency-based fringe pattern sequences and approximately distributes this data along an ideal cosine curve. We propose an invalid points removal method based on an error energy function. By analyzing the relationship between the pixel values of a series of captured co-frequency patterns and an ideal cosine curve, we quantize the error energy by using a Gaussian weighted Euclidean distance. An improved Gaussian filtering method based on modulation intensity is used to significantly increase the error energy difference between the valid points of the target and the invalid points of the shadow/background area. Finally, the points whose error energy is greater than a certain error threshold are removed as invalid points. Experimental results indicate that this method can efficiently remove invalid points in fringe patterns and performs better than existing traditional methods.