Statistical characterization of evaluation strategies for fringe projection systems by means of a model-based noise prediction

Abstract. For optical 3-D measurement systems, camera noise is the dominant uncertainty factor when optically cooperative surfaces are measured in a stable and controlled environment. In industrial applications repeated measurements are seldom executed for this kind of measurement system. This leads to statistically suboptimal results in subsequent evaluation steps as the important information about the quality of individual measurement points is lost. In this work it will be shown that this information can be recovered for phase measuring optical systems with a model-based noise prediction. The capability of this approach will be demonstrated exemplarily for a fringe projection system and it will be shown that this method is indeed able to generate an individual estimate for the spatial stochastic deviations resulting from image sensor noise for each measurement point. This provides a valuable tool for a statistical characterization and comparison of different evaluation strategies, which is demonstrated exemplarily for two different triangulation procedures.