Dual frequency composite pattern temporal phase unwrapping for 3D surface measurement

Phase shifting profilometry (PSP) is widely used in three-dimensional (3D) optical metrology applications such as mechanical engineering, industrial monitoring, computer vision, and biomedicine because of its high measurement accuracy. In PSP, multi-frequency temporal phase unwrapping (TPU) plays a dominant role due to its high-accuracy measurement of surfaces with discontinuities and isolated objects. However, it requires a large number of fringe patterns. To reduce the number of required patterns, a new dual-frequency composite-pattern TPU method is developed, which needs only three patterns. The new method combines two fringe patterns of different frequencies into three composite fringe patterns, reconstructs rough 3D points by demodulating the low-frequency fringe pattern using geometric constraints, and reprojects it to obtain a rough low-frequency absolute phase, which is then refined to correct edge errors. Finally, the high-frequency wrapped phase is unwrapped under the guidance of the refined low-frequency phase, thereby the accurate 3D points are reconstructed based on stereo-vision technology. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve 3D surface measurement with only three images, which greatly improves the measurement efficiency. The proposed method has great application potential for the rapid 3D measurement of discontinuous surfaces and isolated objects.