A HIGH-SPEED AND CONTINUOUS 3D MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

A new system for high-speed and continuous 3D measurement is presented. It is based on the slit-ray projection method. The key component is the image plane constructed by a position-sensitive device (PSD) array that is horizontally unsegmented and linear, but vertically numbered. All PSD row elements are attached to their respective analog signal processors. The analog signals are multiplexed and digitized by multiplexers and A/D converters at appropriate sampling intervals and stored in memory. By virtue of this configuration of the image plane, basis data for 3D measurement are acquired during only one scan of the slit ray at high speed in the form of memory addresses and data. Moreover, if we use large capacity and/or dual port memories, we can continuously obtain 3D range data for as many scenes as needed. The trial system has been implemented with a newly designed 128-channel PSD array and has verified our method, enabling us to obtain successive 3D range data at video rates with an error within +/-0.3%.