High-speed structured light based 3D scanning using an event camera

For a structured light system, scan speed and reconstruction accuracy are usually compromised for limited sensor bandwidth. The bio-inspired camera, also known as the event camera, has high temporal resolution and redundancy-suppressing properties, showing potential to be utilized in a high-speed structured light system. In this paper, we present an event-based structured light system for high-speed 3D scanning, which is composed of an event camera (CeleX-V) and a high-speed digital light projector (TI-DLP6500). The events are triggered by blinking a single pseudo-random pattern by controlling the projector. A simple yet effective algorithm is proposed to generate the event frames from the event stream, and a digital image correlation method is then performed to calculate the displacements, deriving the 3D surfaces of the target objects. A prototype of our proposed system is built with off-the-shelf devices and tested in both static and dynamic scenes. Experiments verify that the proposed system successfully achieves up to a 1000 fps scan rate with an accuracy of 0.27 mm at a distance of 90 cm.