Most 3D reconstruction systems based on structured light use a single camera for sensing, and a projector that emits one or several patterns over the observed surface. We use the following analogy between these systems and a classical two-camera stereoscopic system: the projector can be seen as one camera for which the image of the 3D scene is known (it is the emitted pattern), and the other camera sees the same scene from another position. Thus, we can use the large family of algorithms that are available for stereoscopy, with the advantage that, since we can choose the content of one of the two images, we get an easy and unique solution to the correspondence problem. We use this analogy to calibrate a low-cost structured light system capable of acquiring dynamic scenes, and to recover 3D shape and texture from a single image using correlation-based stereoscopy
