Application of wavelet transform to 3D shape measurement

A new method for analyzing the phase distributions of deformed grating images on the surface of three-dimensional (3D) object to obtain its shape information has been presented. In the conventional technique, Fourier transform profilometry (FTP), there is an intrinsic problem of extracting the fundamental frequency component if the deformation of the grating pattern is either considerable or complicated, which will definitely bring bad influence to the analysis’ accuracy. That means FTP is not appropriate to deal with the complex surfaces of 3D objects. The approach that we here introduce to solve this problem is to utilize Gabor wavelet transform (GWT), a tool excelling for its multiresolution in time-frequency domain, to analyze the phase distributions.