Three-dimensional range acquisition of line-like objects

Presents a new technique for three-dimensional (3D) range acquisition of line-like objects. The objects are illuminated sequentially by three point light sources causing shadow lines on a working plane. These shadow lines are extracted from images of the scene by a robust image preprocessing procedure. Along the images of epipolar lines defined by the geometrical configuration of light sources, camera and working plane, corresponding shadow points are found by a new masking technique suited for implementation on parallel hardware. A subsequent triangulation based upon look-up operations yields the 3D-coordinates of the observed scene points