3D Measurement solutions

Due to continuous integration and rising computing power, 3D sensors are entering more and more application areas, from measurement and safety application to intuitive gesture based interaction. We have been working with a number of 3D sensing systems, including laser scanners, stereo camera pairs as well as time-of-flight cameras based on measuring phase-shift of modulated light.

Time of flight cameras enable us to create compact sensor systems with low computational overhead: While the sensor chips nowadays offer relatively low resolution (QVGA to VGA), they can directly create depth and 3D coordinates in the sensing device, reducing computational burden. Another interesting aspect especially for interaction and security applications is the fact that ToF cameras work down to almost zero distance, so objects at very close range can be tracked, an important difference to stereo cameras.

Stereo pairs, in contrast, can be configured for a variety of operating distances and angles, as optics and camera baseline can be easily adjusted. After calibration of the setup, 3d information can be reconstructed, for example with OpenCV, to return scenes that we feed into the Pointclouds library for 3d analysis. The high resolution of megapixel cameras (for non-realtime applications) offers high flexibility, but depends on good lighting conditions and textured materials for reliable reconstruction.

We have successfully demonstrated solutions for

• Volume measurement
• Surface and Scene reconstruction
• Object detection
• Object classification
• Positioning

We can develop the solution that matches your requirements best, contact us with your requirements for a system solution.