A digital model for a structured light scanning system

Structured light scanning is gaining more attention in manufacturing metrology, as it greatly reduces measuring time and provides, in many applications, adequate precision by using high-quality cameras and projectors. Knowledge of such a system’s working principle can help avoid scanning errors and improve reliability. To simulate the structured light scanning behaviour, a preliminary digital model or virtual structured light scanning system program is proposed in Python, where some principal parameters, like camera intrinsics, lens distortion, and extrinsic cameras-projector coordinates transformation parameters, can be adapted to the actual system configuration. In the proposed virtual scanning system, the virtual projector’s illumination of the input (virtual object) point cloud, the virtual camera’s image formation, and the 3D reconstruction from the synthetic images are simulated on several geometric examples. The reconstructed 3D geometries show high similarities to the input geometries' ground truth. Future work should improve surface light reflection model and introduce error models to faithfully simulate an actual structured light scanning.