A real-time 3D shape measurement with color texture using a monochromatic camera

High-speed real-time three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement with color texture has a large potential in various fields. The majority of the existing methods retrieve the 3D shape with color texture by employing an RGB camera or additional infrared camera; however, the RGB camera is more expensive and has lower sensitivity to light, and employing additional infrared camera requires complex alignment. Given this, a novel method is proposed to simultaneously retrieve the 3D shape and color texture. Specifically, compared with the existing methods, the proposed method only uses one monochromatic camera; as a result, the cameras alignment is not required, simplifying the 3D measurement system and reducing its cost. Three fringe patterns with different frequencies and three corresponding uniform gray-level patterns are set to different colors of red, green, and blue. Then Fourier transform profilometry (FTP) is employed to retrieve the 3D shape from the captured six images. While three uniform gray-level patterns can be used to eliminate the effects of the zero frequency term, they can be also used to generate the color texture of objects meanwhile. The proposed method only requires the capture of six monochromes, and the experimental results demonstrate the success of the proposed method.