New calibration method of fringe projection imaging system

One important step of phase-based 3D imaging system is calibration, which defines the relationship between phase and depth data. Existing calibration methods are complicated and hard to carry out because of using a translation stage or gauge block in a laboratory environment. This paper introduces an automatic calibration method by using a white and black checkerboard and a white plate having discrete markers with known separation and automatically determining each marker´s position. The checkerboard determines the internal parameters of a CCD camera, while the plate gives depth and phase data to establish their relationship for each pixel. Experimental results and performance evaluation show that the proposed calibration method can reliably build up the accurate relationship between phase and depth data with an automatic way.