High speed image acquisition system for 3D reconstruction

Laser triangulation is often the best solution for the 3D (three-dimensional) image reconstruction of an object. And its features, such as simple structure, fast reconstruction speed and flexible use make it widely used in 3D reconstruction. However, due to its high image frame rate, huge data, and requiring a large amount of computation for image processing algorithm, it is hard to be applied in embedded system. This paper presents a hardware solution for high-speed image acquisition system which is implemented on Xilinx FPGA. The experimental results indicate that this acquisition system works normally and its performance is steady and reliable, under the extreme conditions with an image resolution of 1280∗384 and a frame rate of 9,000. It is still a challenging problem to extract the position information of the light bar in real time. In order to solve this problem, a parallel gray center gravity method based on FPGA is proposed to detect the position of light bar in this paper. Test results show that the proposed method can correctly extract the position information of the light bar in real time when the image frame rate reaches 9,000 frames. The power consumption is only about 4 watts.