Profile detection by projection of coloured patterns

The paper presents a study to detect the three-dimensional profile of an object using a technique based on the projection of colour-coded lines. The accessibility at low-cost of projectors and digital photographic cameras has approved the employment and the development of these techniques. They provide information concerning the profile through the acquisition of a couple of images. The first one concerns a reference plane and it is captured only once, while the second one refers to the object image. The proposed methodology simplifies the individuation of homologous lines within the two images, when grating projection techniques are employed. Even though these methods are conceptually very simple, they are rarely applied because of this difficulty in stating the correspondence between observed deformation and projected line. The attribution of a different colour to every single line, or to a set of them, introduces an element useful for their selection. After the image acquisition, the data pertaining to the profile are extracted examining the image by means of an algorithm developed in Matlab language for this application. The research work is in progress beyond the results presented in this paper, which already represent a excellent starting point for further studies and evolutions of the technique.