Circular fringe projection profilometry

In this Letter, a novel three-dimensional (3D) measurement method, called the circular fringe projection profilometry (CFPP), is proposed. Similar to the conventional fringe projection profilometry, CFPP also requires fringe pattern projection and capture, phase demodulation, and phase unwrapping. However, it works with a totally different mechanism. CFPP recovers the height of a point by calculating its distance to the optical center of a projector along the optical axis. This distance is calculated with the aid of the divergence angle of a projected light ray and the distance between the measured point and the optical axis. The distance between the measured point and the optical axis is detected by a camera with telecentric lenses, while the divergence angle can be calculated from the phase of a captured circular fringe pattern. The validity of CFPP is confirmed by a set of experiments.