Three-dimensional profiling with binary fringes

using phase-shifting interferometry algorithms

Gastón A. Ayubi,1 J. Matías Di Martino,1 Julia R. Alonso,1 Ariel Fernández,1

César D. Perciante,2 and José A. Ferrari1,*
1
Instituto de Física, Facultad de Ingeniería, UdelaR, J. Herrera y Reissig 565, Montevideo, Uruguay
2
Facultad de Ingeniería y Tecnologías, UCUDAL, Av. 8 de Octubre 2738, Montevideo, Uruguay
*Corresponding author: jferrari@fing.edu.uy

Received 23 September 2010; revised 12 November 2010; accepted 17 November 2010;

posted 17 November 2010 (Doc. ID 135569); published 6 January 2011

Three-dimensional shape measurements by sinusoidal fringe projection using phase-shifting interfero-

metry algorithms are distorted by the nonlinear response in intensity of commercial video projectors and
digital cameras. To solve the problem, we present a method that consists in projecting and acquiring a
temporal sequence of strictly binary patterns, whose (adequately weighted) average leads to a sinusoidal
fringe pattern with the required number of bits. Since binary patterns consist of “ones” and “zeros”—and
no half-tones are involved—the nonlinear response of the projector and the camera will not play a role,
and a nearly unit contrast gray-level sinusoidal fringe pattern is obtained. Validation experiments are
presented. © 2011 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: 120.0120, 120.2650, 100.5070.

1. Introduction tially hinders the application of calibration and com-

A simple technique for three-dimensional (3-D) pro-
filing is to project a series of equally displaced
(fringe-shifted) sinusoidal patterns on the test object,
and apply phase-shifting interferometry (PSI) algo-
rithms to retrieve its 3-D shape (see, e.g., [1,2] and
the references therein). A typical setup for digital
fringe projection consists in a commercial video pro-
jector for projecting fringes and a digital camera for
acquiring the distorted patterns [3].
Any of these devices has a nonlinear response in
the light intensity (i.e., which is often called the
“gamma problem”). To get a strictly sinusoidal pat-
tern, the nonlinearity must be overcome. A variety
of techniques have been proposed with this purpose,
e.g., projection of predistorted patterns [4], creation
of a lookup table for error compensation [5], use of a
calibration board [6], and other techniques [7–9].
However, it has been found [10] that the response
in intensity of projectors actually changes over time,
and thus needs frequent recalibration, which par-
0003-6935/11/020147-08$15.00/0
© 2011 Optical Society of America
pensation schemes.
In the literature, there are also references about
the use of binary patterns to elude the nonlinearity
problem [10–14]. But, to achieve a sinusoidal pat-
tern, some of the methods require blurring to a cer-
tain degree by means of either defocusing the
projector [10–12] or digitally smoothing the acquired
patterns [13], which has the disadvantage of lower-
ing the image contrast.
The purpose of the present paper is to present a
new approach for overcoming the nonlinear response
of commercial projectors and cameras. Specifically,
the proposed method consists of two stages.
First, we project on the test object a temporal se-
quence of binary fringes whose superposition (with
the adequate weights) reproduces a sinusoidal fringe
pattern, as required for applying PSI-reconstruction
algorithms. [In order to generate the adequate num-
ber of frames (depending on the specific PSI algo-
rithm), this stage should be repeated using shifted
fringes.]
Second, each image of the sequence is acquired and
a thresholding technique to generate a sequence of

10 January 2011 / Vol. 50, No. 2 / APPLIED OPTICS 147

Fig. 1. Binary sequence M 1i ðx; yÞ (with i ¼ 1; 2; …8) representing the sinusoidal pattern shown at the bottom (right corner) of the figure.
binary images is applied, i.e., emulating a 1 bit cam-
era acquisition. In principle, this last procedure
mitigates the problem of the nonlinear response of
the camera, because the obtained images will contain
only “zeros” and “ones” (similarly to the projected
patterns), so that the camera’s nonlinear response
will not play an important role.
The technique described in the present article
resembles some previous works on structured illumi-
nation found in the literature (see, e.g., [14] and the
references therein). However, to the best of our
knowledge, there are no references to the application
of PSI techniques by simultaneous projection and
acquisition of binary patterns.
In Section 2, we describe the theory, and in
Section 3 we will present validation experiments.
148 APPLIED OPTICS / Vol. 50, No. 2 / 10 January 2011
2. Theory
A. Projection of Binary Fringes
In the following we will work with 256
gray-level images (i.e., 8 bit), with intensity levels
Iðx; yÞ running from 0 to 255 at each point ðx; yÞ.
(Of course, the proposed method can be used
with images having an arbitrary number of gray
levels.)
One can imagine a gray-level image as the super-
position of eight (time-multiplexed) binary images
fM i g (with i ¼ 1; 2; …8), where M 1 is the most signif-
icant bit of the binary representation of I. That is,
each M i ðx; yÞ takes the values 1 or 0 depending on
the integer number Iðx; yÞ.
 The function Iðx; yÞ can be reconstructed through
the well-known formula
X
8 In practice, the reflectivity of the test surface will
Iðx; yÞ ¼ 2ð8−iÞ M i ðx; yÞ:
i¼1
In the present work, we deal with the issue of gen-
erating sequences of binary images to reproduce
high-quality phase-shifted sinusoidal fringe pat-
terns, i.e., ideally we have to generate a series of
phase-shifted intensity frames given by
I k ðx; yÞ ¼ ð255=2Þ½1 þ cosð2πf 0 x þ αk Þ
;
where f 0 is the fringe frequency, and αk is the kth
phase step required for the application of PSI algo-
rithms. Each gray-level image I k ðx; yÞ has to be gen-
erated through a formula similar to (1) ,
X
8 sult, and the dominant role will be played by M ki,
I k ðx; yÞ ¼ 2ð8−iÞ M ki ðx; yÞ;
i¼1
where fM 1i ðx; yÞg is the sequence of eight binary
images corresponding to k ¼ 1, and fM 2i ðx; yÞg is a
sequence similar to fM 1i ðx; yÞg but with the binary
fringes shifted a quantity ðα2 − α1 Þ=2πf 0 along the
x axis, and so on.
The binary image sequence fM 1i ðx; yÞg to be used
in our experiments (see Section 3) was generated
using a standard procedure: Fig. 1 shows the image
sequence generated using MATLAB function
dec2bin.m. (For simplicity, only a couple of periods
have been reproduced in the figure.) At the bottom
(right corner) of Fig. 1, the sinusoidal pattern recon-
structed using Eq. (3) is shown.
B. Binarization of the Acquired Fringes
In 3-D profiling by fringe projection, the visual direc-
tion of the acquiring camera (CCD) makes an angle θ
with the direction of the light beam illuminating the
test surface (T), as schematically shown in Fig. 2. It is
easy to verify that
x ¼ cosðθÞx0 þ sinðθÞz0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ;
where ðx0 ; y0 Þ represents a point on the detector array
of the camera, and z0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ is the corresponding sur-
face profile to be retrieved.
Substituting x → cosðθÞx0 þ sinðθÞz0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ and y →
0
y in Eqs. (2) and (3), one obtains
I k ðx0 ;y0 Þ ¼ ð255=2Þf1þcos½2πf 0 ðcosðθÞx0
þsinðθÞz0 Þþαk
g
X
8
¼ 2ð8−iÞ M ki ðcosðθÞx0 þsinðθÞz0 ðx0 ;y0 Þ;y0 Þ: ð5Þ
i¼1
This expression tells us that, by acquiring
the (distorted) binary patterns M ki ðcosðθÞx0 þ
sinðθÞz0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ; y0 Þ, it is possible to reconstruct the
different frames I k ðx0 ; y0 Þ required to apply a PSI
algorithm and retrieve z0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ.
ð1Þ appear as a factor multiplying the distorted binary
patterns, so that the actually acquired image will
be of the form
X
8
I k ðx0 ; y0 Þ ¼ Rðx0 ; y0 Þ 2ð8−iÞ M ki ðcosðθÞx0
i¼1
þ sinðθÞz0 ; y0 Þ; ð6Þ
ð2Þ where Rðx0 ; y0 Þ (with 0 ≤ R ≤ 1) denotes the reflectiv-
ity of the surface.
The binarization (thresholding) procedure applied
to the acquired images tends naturally to solve the
problem of the reflectivity variations because, if
the threshold is set low enough, the factor involving
the surface reflectivity has no effect on the final re-
ð3Þ which ideally already takes the value “one” or “zero.”
The usual procedure to minimize the role of the
surface reflectivity (see, e.g., [15]) is to acquire an ad-
ditional image I 0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ under homogeneous illumi-
nation, so that I 0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ ∼ Rðx0 ; y0 Þ, and normalize
the frames I k ðx0 ; y0 Þ by I 0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ, to finally recover
images unaffected by the reflectivity factor.
3. Experimental Results
We performed a series of validation experiments
using a commercial LCD projector (Model CP-RX80,
Hitachi) with 1024 × 768 pixels. The images were ac-
quired with a monochromatic 8 bit digital camera
(Model DC310, Thorlabs) with 1024 × 768 pixels, un-
der a viewing angle θ ≈ 33°.
First, to characterize the response of the camera/
projector system, we projected a digital image of a
ð4Þ
Fig. 2. Experimental setup. T is the test surface and CCD is a
digital camera.
10 January 2011 / Vol. 50, No. 2 / APPLIED OPTICS 149
Fig. 3. (a) Image of a digital sinusoidal pattern projected over a
plane orthogonal to the projection direction and acquired by the
camera (without a binarization procedure); (b) representative in-
tensity cut along the pattern horizontal direction; (c) FFT of the
intensity cut.
gray-level sinusoidal pattern of (arbitrary) frequency
f 0 ≈ 0:2 cm−1 over a plane surface orthogonal to the
projection direction, and acquired the gray-level
images with the camera. [Clearly the lateral view
of the projected pattern should have a fundamental
frequency f 00 ¼ f 0 = cosðθÞ.] In this experiment, we did
not perform the binarization procedure.
The acquired image is shown in Fig. 3(a) (after
applying a 3 × 3 median filter). Figure 3(b) shows a
representative intensity cut along the pattern hori-
zontal direction, while Fig. 3(c) shows its fast Fourier
transform (FFT). The FFT shows that the pattern
has large spurious frequency components in addition
to the expected fundamental frequency f 00. From
Figs. 3(b) and 3(c), it is clear that the response of
the camera/projector system is nonlinear and, thus,
the resultant image is far from being an ideal sinu-
soidal pattern.
150 APPLIED OPTICS / Vol. 50, No. 2 / 10 January 2011
Fig. 4. (a) Gray-level pattern reconstructed from Eq. (5) using the
proposed method; (b) representative intensity cut along the pat-
tern horizontal direction; (c) FFT of the intensity cut.
In a second series of experiments, we tested the
performance of the proposed method for reconstruct-
ing ideal sinusoidal fringes: we projected a binary se-
quence fM 1i ðx; yÞg (with the same fundamental
frequency f 0 as before) over a plane orthogonal to
the projection direction [see Fig. 1 (i ¼ 1; 2; …8)],
and the images acquired by the camera were binar-
ized applying Otsu’s thresholding procedure (see,
e.g., [16]).
Figure 4(a) shows the gray-level pattern recon-
structed using Eq. (5), and applying a 3 × 3 median
filter afterward.
Figure 4(b) shows a representative intensity
cut along the pattern horizontal direction, while
Fig. 4(c) shows its FFT. Figures 4(b) and 4(c) show
that the reconstructed intensity pattern is a quasi-
ideal sinusoidal pattern of frequency f 00, with con-
trast very close to the unit.
To illustrate the performance of our method in re-
constructing a complex surface, we make experi-
ments using a plaster mask as a test surface.
Fig. 5. Deformed binary sequence M 1i ði ¼ 1; 2; …8Þ after binarization of the acquired images. The pattern reconstructed using Eq. (5) is
shown at the bottom (right corner) of the figure.
First, to minimize the role of the surface reflectiv-
ity, we acquire a normalization image, I 0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ,
under homogeneous illumination (see Subsection 2.B
above).
Second, we projected the sequence of eight binary
patterns shown in Fig. 1 (i ¼ 1; 2; …8) on the test sur-
face. The images acquired by the camera were nor-
malized by I 0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ, and then binarized using
Otsu’s thresholding method to generate the distorted
binary sequence fM 1i g, which is shown in Fig. 5
(i ¼ 1; 2; …8).
By means of Eq. (5), from the distorted fM 1i g one
obtains a reconstructed gray-level image I 1 ðx0 ; y0 Þ,
which is shown at the bottom (right corner) of
Fig. 5. Despite a small amount of “salt and pepper”
noise (which can be easily filtered out by a 3 × 3
median filter at a posterior stage), the reconstructed
image is a high-quality image with unit contrast.
In general, one has to acquire additional images to
perform 3-D profiling by applying a three- or four-
frame PSI algorithm. In the present work, we chose
a phase step of π=2 rad. Thus, we repeated the fringe
projection procedure using a shifted sequence
fM 2i ðx; yÞg, which was obtained from fM 1i ðx; yÞg
[see Fig. 1 (i ¼ 1; 2; …8)] by shifting the fringes a
quarter-period along the x axis. (Of course, the pro-
cedure can be generalized to a different phase-step
and to arbitrary numbers of frames.)
After normalizing and binarizing the images ac-
quired by the camera, we achieved the (distorted)
binary sequence fM 2i g shown in Fig. 6 (i ¼ 1; 2; …8).
By using Eq. (5), from fM 2i g a reconstructed
10 January 2011 / Vol. 50, No. 2 / APPLIED OPTICS 151
Fig. 6. Deformed binary sequence M 1i ði ¼ 1; 2; …8Þ after binarization of the acquired images. The pattern reconstructed using Eq. (5) is
shown at the bottom (right corner) of the figure.

gray-level image I 2 ðx0 ; y0 Þ is obtained, which is shown Finally, for comparison purposes, we projected on
at the bottom (right corner) of Fig. 6. the test surface a sequence of four “sinusoidal” pat-
Since the reconstructed images I 1 ðx0 ; y0 Þ and terns [similar to that shown in Fig. 3(a)] with a phase
I 2 ðx0 ; y0 Þ have unit contrast, in principle it would be shift of π=2 rad between consecutive patterns. We ac-
not necessary to acquire additional frames for re- quired the gray-level images with the camera and ap-
trieving the 3-D surface shape. From Eq. (5) it is clear plied a standard four-frame algorithm to reconstruct
that the 3-D profile will be given by the surface profile. (In this experiment, we did not

   perform the binarization procedure.)
1 255 − 2I 2 ðx0 ; y0 Þ The reconstructed profile is shown in Figs. 7(c) and
z0 ðx0 ; y0 Þ ¼ arctan
2πf 0 sinðθÞ 2I 1 ðx0 ; y0 Þ − 255 7(d) (after unwrapping and filtering as before).
x0 The reconstructed surface profile is corrupt by a
− : ð7Þ spurious periodic undulation, which is clearly visible
tanðθÞ
in Figs. 7(c) and 7(d) as a periodic pattern of vertical
Different views of the reconstructed 3-D surface fringes superimposed to the smooth surface of
(after unwrapping and filtering) are shown in the mask. This kind of phase error is a character-
Figs. 7(a) and 7(b). istic feature due to the nonlinear response of the

152 APPLIED OPTICS / Vol. 50, No. 2 / 10 January 2011


Fig. 7. Different views of the reconstructed 3-D surface (after un-
wrapping and filtering). (a), (b) Smooth surface profile recon-
structed using the proposed method; (c), (d) reconstructed
profile using standard four-frame PSI algorithm by gray-level
fringe projection and acquisition.
camera/projector system [see, e.g., Fig. 2 in [9]). On
the contrary, the profile reconstructed using our
method [Figs. 7(a) and 7(b)] presents a comparatively
smoother surface without spurious features.
4. Discussion and Conclusions
In general, 3-D profiling by sinusoidal fringe projec-
tion using PSI algorithms may be distorted by the
nonlinear response of commercial video projectors
and digital cameras. To solve these problems, we
have suggested a new approach that consists in
the simultaneous projection and acquisition of se-
quences of strictly binary patterns.
The key issue underlying the technique is a well-
established principle of communication engineering,
which states that, when a signal consists only of
“ones” and “zeros,” the distortion due to the nonlinear
response of the involved devices may be minimized.
Thus, the projection of binary fringes allows over-
coming the nonlinear response of the projector
and, simultaneously, the binarization of the acquired
images (which ideally are already binary) minimizes
the problem of the nonlinear response of the camera.
The utilization of binary patterns in 3-D shape mea-
surements has some precedents in the literature, but
as yet it has not been used in conjunction with PSI
algorithms, as in this work, where we do not require
any degree of defocusing.
Experimentally we demonstrated that the applica-
tion of our technique allows a high-quality 3-D profile
reconstruction without the spurious features intro-
duced by the nonlinear response of the system
camera/projector.
The advantage of the method with respect to other
approaches (e.g., [4–7]) is that we do not require ca-
librating or compensating the response of the
system, which could change over time. Another im-
portant advantage—in comparison with classical
methods using multiple-step PSI algorithms [8,9]
—is that we are not assuming that the nonlinearity
is necessarily associated to a power law, i.e., a one-
parameter gamma function. {Actually, the intensity
responses of projectors and cameras are considerably
complex; they show plateaus near the threshold- and
saturation-intensity levels, which cannot be ade-
quately described by a simple power law (see, e.g.,
Fig. 12 of [7]).}
A drawback of the proposed procedure is that
blurred fringes may cause some coding errors in
the final 3-D result, so that the measuring range will
be limited by the depth of field of the system. [In our
experiment, the depth of field of the projector/camera
system was larger than the depth of the mask to be
reconstructed (which was of the order of 6–7 cm).]
Another drawback of this technique is that we
have a sequence of images (so many images as bits
we would like to have) for each frame to be used
in conjunction with the PSI algorithm. In our experi-
ments we used a commercial LCD projector and a ca-
sually available standard camera, which work at
video rates (i.e., ∼15–30 frames=s). Since we re-
quired two shifted 8 bit frames (i.e., two image se-
quences, each of them consisting of 8 images) for
achieving a 3-D surface profile, with the projector
and camera used, we can achieve a maximum recon-
struction rate of 1–2 profiles per second.
In principle, it could appear difficult to use the pro-
posed approach in real-time applications requiring
higher reconstruction rates. However, with the intro-
duction of the modern digital micrometer device
(DMD) digital light processing technology, the projec-
tion of binary patterns at high rates (i.e., 1 kHz) does
not represent a problem. Of course, the implementa-
tion of the method in real-time applications will also
require a camera with acquisition synchronized with
the DMD projector. An alternative to reduce the
high-acquisition-rate requirement could be to codify
the binary images in the three fundamental colors.
This issue will be investigated in future work.
J. A. Ferrari and J. M. Di Martino acknowledge fi-
nancial support from Programa de desarrollo de
Ciencias Básicas (PEDECIBA) (Uruguay) and the
Comisión Sectorial de Investigación Científica
(CSIC, UdelaR, Uruguay).
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