Low-cost 3D range finder system

Nowadays, 3D data are popularly performed in computer, and 3D browsers manipulate 3D model in the virtual world. Yet, till now, 3D digitizer is still a high-cost product and not a familiar equipment. In order to meet the requirement of 3D fancy world, in this paper, the concept of a low-cost 3D digitizer system is proposed to catch 3D range data from objects. The specified optical design of the 3D extraction is effective to depress the size, and the processing software of the system is compatible with PC to promote its portable capability. Both features contribute a low-cost system in PC environment in contrast to a large system bundled in an expensive workstation platform. In the structure of 3D extraction, laser beam and CCD camera are adopted to construct a 3D sensor. Instead of 2 CCD cameras for capturing laser lines twice before, a 2-in-1 system is proposed to merge 2 images in one CCD which still retains the information of two fields of views to inhibit occlusion problems. Besides, optical paths of two camera views are reflected by mirror in order that the volume of the system can be minified with one rotary axis only. It makes a portable system be more possible to work. Combined with the processing software executable in PC windows system, the proposed system not only saves hardware cost but also processing time of software. The system performance achieves 0.05mm accuracy. It shows that a low-cost system is more possible to be highperformance.