High-Precision 6DOF Pose Estimation via Global Phase Retrieval in Fringe Projection Profilometry for 3D Mapping
This addresses the challenge of precise pose estimation for 3D mapping in inspection and metrology, offering an incremental improvement over existing drift-correction and ICP-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving high-precision six-degree-of-freedom pose estimation for large-scale 3D mapping using digital fringe projection, by augmenting a moving system with a fixed global projector to avoid feature extraction and sampling sensitivity. The result is sub-millimeter pose accuracy, high repeatability under aggressive subsampling, and reduced error accumulation compared to conventional methods.
Digital fringe projection (DFP) enables micrometer-level 3D reconstruction, yet extending it to large-scale mapping remains challenging because six-degree-of-freedom pose estimation often cannot match the reconstruction's precision. Conventional iterative closest point (ICP) registration becomes inefficient on multi-million-point clouds and typically relies on downsampling or feature-based selection, which can reduce local detail and degrade pose precision. Drift-correction methods improve long-term consistency but do not resolve sampling sensitivity in dense DFP point clouds.We propose a high-precision pose estimation method that augments a moving DFP system with a fixed, intrinsically calibrated global projector. Using the global projector's phase-derived pixel constraints and a PnP-style reprojection objective, the method estimates the DFP system pose in a fixed reference frame without relying on deterministic feature extraction, and we experimentally demonstrate sampling invariance under coordinate-preserving subsampling. Experiments demonstrate sub-millimeter pose accuracy against a reference with quantified uncertainty bounds, high repeatability under aggressive subsampling, robust operation on homogeneous surfaces and low-overlap views, and reduced error accumulation when used to correct ICP-based trajectories. The method extends DFP toward accurate 3D mapping in quasi-static scenarios such as inspection and metrology, with the trade-off of time-multiplexed acquisition for the additional projector measurements.