A calibration method for structured light systems based on a virtual camera

Structured light systems are a simple and efficient tool in the field of 3D reconstruction. Existing calibration methods of structured light systems are either not precise or elastic. In this paper, an easy to use method is proposed. The calibration of a structured light system can accomplished with a good accuracy. The projector projects a checkerboard pattern rendered by OpenGL functions onto a planar board, and the coordinates of corner points in the projector image plane are adjusted to the target position with an iterative algorithm. Thus, the projector can "view" the printed chessboard pattern. The calibration of a projector becomes essentially the same as that of a monocular camera. Meanwhile, the projector calibration doesn´t depend on a pre-calibrated camera, which makes errors of the camera calibration cannot effect the projector calibration. Experimental results show that the mean re-projection error of the projector is less than 1 pixel.