Design of thin-structured-light projection system for small-height measurement

A thin-structured light projection system with simple setup is proposed and applied to small-height measurement. In this system, the design of structured light pattern is carried out on the computer. The structure, color, geometric dimension, motion mode, projection brightness, contrast, and other attributes of the pattern can be edited easily. The optical system with zoom function is designed, which can output thin-structured-light fringe with a minimum width of 10 μm. The camera and microscope are used to construct a vision system, which is used to capture the pattern of structured light. The three-dimensional (3D) shape reconstruction is realized by analyzing the pattern of structured light. The results show that this system can project a small width of thin-structured light pattern, which is very suitable for 3D shape reconstruction of microscopic objects with the small-height of tens of microns to hundreds of microns.