Optical alignment technique of 3D geometric camera system for 3D imaging

Abstract

We present a general concept of the proposed 3D imaging system called 3D-geometric camera (3D-gCam) to pick up pixel-wise 3D surface profile information along with color information. The 3D-gCam system includes two isotropic light sources placed at different geometric locations, an optical alignment system for aligning the light rays projected onto the scene, and a high precision camera. To determine the pixel-wise distance information, the system captures two images of the same scene during the stropping of the each light source. Then, the intensity of each pixel location in these two images along with the displacement between the light sources are utilized for calculating the distance information of object points corresponding to pixel locations in the image to generate a dense 3D point cloud. The approach is suitable for capturing of 3D and color information in high definition image format synchronously.