Optical triangulation range scanners are finding wide usage in
industrial inspection, metrology, medicine, and computer graphics.
The standard methods for extracting range data from structured light
reflecting off of an object are accurate only for planar surfaces of
uniform reflectance illuminated by an incoherent source. Using these
methods, curved surfaces, discontinuous surfaces, and surfaces of
varying reflectance cause systematic distortions of the range data.
Coherent light sources such as lasers introduce speckle artifacts that
further degrade the data. We present a new ranging method based on
analyzing the time evolution of the structured light reflections.
Using our spacetime analysis, we can correct for each of these
artifacts, thereby attaining significantly higher accuracy using
existing technology. We present results that demonstrate the validity
of our method using a commercial laser stripe triangulation scanner.
