Calibration of the depth measurement system with a laser pointer, a camera and a plain mirror

Characteristic analysis of the depth measurement system with a laser, a camera and a rotating mirror has been done and the parameter calibration technique for it has been proposed. In the proposed depth measurement system, the laser beam is reflected to the object by the rotating mirror and again the position of the laser beam is observed through the same mirror by the camera. The depth of the object pointed by the laser beam is computed depending on the pixel position on the CCD. There involved several number of internal and external parameters such as inter-pixel distance, focal length, position and orientation of the system components in the depth measurement error. In this paper, it is shown through the error sensitivity analysis of the parameters that the most important parameters in the sense of error sources are the angle of the laser beam and the inter pixel distance. The calibration techniques to minimize the effect of such major parameters are proposed.