Measuring the area and volume of the human body with structured light

An inexpensive computer imaging system capable of accurately recovering the 3D surface of the human body is described. This system uses biologically safe structured white light. A uniform square grid pattern is projected onto the body and an image of this pattern is recorded using a single solid-state camera. By locating the intersections of the image grid stripes and matching them correctly to the projected grid pattern, the 3D positions of points on the body can be determined by triangulation. The authors summarize the processing, discuss the geometry of the imaging system and show how 3D information can be recovered. They describe the actual processing steps and algorithms used to locate the data used to reconstruct the patch. Experiments are presented. These preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of the imaging system. Future developments are discussed