Efficient Structured Light Pattern Using Inverse Rectification

Abstract

This thesis presents inverse rectification, a novel method for establishing correspondence in depth estimation. The rectifying homography of the projector-camera pair is used to warp a pattern of vertical dash features. The pattern imparts upon the system the property that projected features will fall on distinct conjugate epipolar lines of the rectified projector and acquired camera images. This reduces the correspondence search to a trivial constant-time table lookup, and leads to robust and extremely efficient disparity calculations. A projector-camera range sensor is developed based on this method, and is shown experimentally to be effective, with bandwidth exceeding some existing consumer-level range sensors.