Digital acquisition system for high-speed 3-D imaging

High-speed digital three-dimensional (3-D) imagery is possible using multiple independent charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras with sequentially triggered acquisition and individual field storage capability. The system described here utilizes sixteen independent cameras, providing versatility in configuration and image acquisition. By aligning the cameras in nearly coincident lines-of-sight, a sixteen frame two-dimensional (2-D) sequence can be captured. The delays can be individually adjusted lo yield a greater number of acquired frames during the more rapid segments of the event. Additionally, individual integration periods may be adjusted to ensure adequate radiometric response while minimizing image blur. An alternative alignment and triggering scheme arranges the cameras into two angularly separated banks of eight cameras each. By simultaneously triggering correlated stereo pairs, an eight-frame sequence of stereo images may be captured. In the first alignment scheme the camera lines-of-sight cannot be made precisely coincident. Thus representation of the data as a monocular sequence introduces the issue of independent camera coordinate registration with the real scene. This issue arises more significantly using the stereo pair method to reconstruct quantitative 3-D spatial information of the event as a function of time. The principal development here will be the derivation and evaluation of a solution transform and its inverse for the digital data which will yield a 3-D spatial mapping as a function of time.