3D imager using dual color-balanced lights

A novel method for grabbing 3D shape of an object is proposed. It uses a pair of color-coded light sources to create a 3D-coordinated illumination space. The intensities of two modulation colors are complementally balanced, which makes the sum of the intensities of the colors a constant. This method demonstrates the abilities of uniquely representing any point in the 3D-coordinated illumination space, reducing the measuring problems in blind area, and compensating the effect caused by changes of surface color and reflection. In addition, this method has the ability of acquiring the 3D shape information in parallel and the algorithm is fairly simple, so the 3D imaging speed is basically restricted by the frame rate of the color CCD camera.