Calibrating a Structured Light Stripe System: A Novel Approach

The problem associated with calibrating a structured light stripe system is that known world points on the calibration target do not normally fall onto every light stripe plane illuminated from the projector. We present in this paper a novel calibration method that employs the invariance of the cross ratio to overcome this problem. Using 4 known non-coplanar sets of 3 collinear world points and with no prior knowledge of the perspective projection matrix of the camera, we show that world points lying on each light stripe plane can be computed. Furthermore, by incorporating the homography between the light stripe and image planes, the 4 x 3 image-to-world transformation matrix for each stripe plane can also be recovered. The experiments conducted suggest that this novel calibration method is robust, economical, and is applicable to many dense shape reconstruction tasks.