Adaptive Pattern Resolution for Structured Light 3D Camera System

3D depth measurement based on structured light has been gaining an increased attention, especially, in the field of robotics and automation. This is due to its capability of capturing a high accuracy of 3D point cloud in the trade-off with its scan speed. One way for a 3D camera to achieve a higher scan speed is combining a high frame rate of machine vision camera with an embedded projector. However, an embedded projector with Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) is often subject to a nonstandard pixel resolution. As such, to obtain a good quality of dense 3D point cloud, it is necessary to adapt structured light patterns to fit into the DMD pixel resolution at hand. This paper proposes a method of adaptive pattern generation that allows a maximum utilization of a non-standard resolution of DMD pixels for a structured light 3D camera. Experimental result shows that the method improves the density of a captured 3D point cloud by as much as 60%.