Fringe Projection Simulation Software for 3D Shape Measurements

Profilometry with LCD or DLP beamers has become a common three-dimensional scanning technique[1]. Many attempts are made to enhance the accuracy of these measurement systems, by developing new algorithms or improving the existing ones. Comparing these algorithms to the existing methods requires building a validation setup. This validation setup has to be carefully calibrated to obtain realistic measurement data. Additionally the distortions of the different components need to be compensated. Building these setups often takes a lot of valuable research time while the goal of many research projects is to improve the mathematical fringe analysis tools without having to deal with practical problems of a test setup. This paper presents the 'Fringe Projection Simulator', a program which can simulate three commonly used fringe projection setups. All three setups contain a beamer and a camera with a diverging lens.