Method and system for generating structured light with spatio-temporal patterns for 3D scene reconstruction

A method for generating a structured light pattern, wherein the structured light pattern includes a set of patterns in a sequence, comprising the steps of:

• initializing a base pattern, wherein the base pattern includes a sequence of colored stripes such that each subsequence of the colored stripes is unique for a particular size of the subsequence;
• shifting hierarchically, spatially and temporally the base pattern a predetermined number of times to generate the set of patterns, wherein each pattern is different spatially and temporally, wherein the shifting further comprises:
• initializing a first pattern to the base pattern, wherein the colored stripes in the base pattern have a stripe width of l=8 in terms of pixels in the pattern as projected, and each consecutive 3 stripes is unique;
• shifting the first pattern by
• -
• 3
• 2
• ⁢
• l
• =
• -
• 12
• to obtain a second pattern;
• shifting the first and second patterns by
• 1
• 4
• ⁢
• l
• =
• 2
• to obtain third and fourth patterns, respectively;
• and
• shifting the first, second, third, and fourth patterns by
• 1
• 4
• ⁢
• l
• +
• 1
• =
• 3
• to obtain fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth patterns, respectively;
• and
• determining, while projecting the set of patterns onto the scene, a unique location of each pixel in a set of images acquired of a scene with respect to the set of patterns, wherein there is one image for each pattern, and wherein the initializing, shifting and determining steps are performed in a processor.