Active stereo emerges as an alternative approach to the traditional use of two cameras.
After adjusting the lighting and the focus of the camera and projector, the camera is first calibrated, the plane equation of each sheet of light projected by the projector is then computed. This matrix captures the intrinsic parameters of the camera, and the rotation and translation between the camera and the global coordinate frame defined by the calibration target. For each pixel in the image that is illuminated by a particular sheet of light from the projector or laser unit, the plane equation of the sheet of light would have been computed from the projector calibration procedure, simple triangulation is only required to compute the 3-D coordinates of the pixel.