Patent ID: 8805057

Claim:
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.