Low-power laser image enhancement via deep feature recovery for HDR 3D measurement

Laser 3D measurement has gained widespread applications in industrial metrology . Still, it is usually limited by surfaces with high dynamic range (HDR) or the colorful surface texture of measured surfaces, such as metal and black industrial parts. Currently, conventional methods generally work with relatively strong-power laser intensities, which could potentially damage the sample or induce eye-safety concerns. For deep-learning-based methods, due to the different reflectivity of the measured surfaces, the HDR problem may require cumbersome adjustment of laser intensity in order to acquire enough training data. Even so, the problem of inaccurate ground truth may occur. To address these issues, this paper proposes the deep feature recovery (DFR) strategy to enhance low-light laser stripe images for achieving HDR 3D reconstruction with low cost, high robustness, and eye safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle the challenge of high measurement costs associated with measuring HDR surfaces in laser 3D measurement. In learning the features of low-power laser images, the proposed strategy has a superior generalization ability and is insensitive to different low laser powers and variant surface reflectivity. To verify this point, we specially design the experiments by training the network merely using the diffusely reflective masks (DRM951) and testing the performance using diffusely reflective masks, metal surfaces, black industrial parts (contained in the constructed datasets DRO690, MO191, and BO107) and their hybrid scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DFR strategy has good performances on robustness by testing different measurement scenes. For variously reflective surfaces, such as diffusely reflective surfaces, metal surfaces, and black parts surfaces, the reconstructed 3D shapes all have a similar quality to the reference method.