Full-hemisphere automatical optical 3D measurement system

The measurement of 3D object shapes for the purpose of digitization of CAD-models and for the complete manufacturing control of components are important tasks of modern industrial inspection. The proposed 3D measurement system using structured-light illumination has the ability to avoid illumination-caused difficulties, like shadowing and excessive light intensities by reflection and diffraction at surface of the object, while measuring technical surfaces. For this purpose, the object under test is successively illuminated with a periodic grating structure from at last three different directions, using a telecentric projection system. At least three linearly independent phase-measurement values are measured by gray-code techniques to calculate the 3D coordinates of the object points. The experimental setup allows the determination of phase-measurement values with illuminations from up to 16 different directions. This is connected with a simultaneous variation of the intensity of projec t grating structures. Thus, areas of shadows are shifted across the object surface to spots where they have no influence on the result of the measurement, and also specular effects can be suppressed. Furthermore, in order to obtain the entire surface, the object to be digitized must be covered by many overlapping views taken from different directions. To view the entire surface, the object is moved into various measuring positions, using a second rotation axis. These views are merged within an object-centered coordinate system and are automatically rearranged into a uniform grid. For this purpose, a calibration procedure has been developed to measure absolute coordinates within a defined object coordinate system, so that the combination of the particular images is simple, because all measurements are performed within the same system of object coordinates. The power of this concept has been experimentally demonstrated, for example, by measuring the complete 3D shape and/or the roughness of speculary reflecting technical surfaces of different volumina.