Camera helps foot scanner measure feet in seconds

AUGUST 4--Approximately 150 different steps are required to craft a custom-made shoe. A separate last must be formed for each shoe, for which the shoemaker takes measurements in 35 places. This procedure can now be handled by a foot scanner that not only speeds up the manufacturing process, but also makes it less expensive.

Corpus.e (Stuttgart, Germany) has developed an affordable 3-D foot scanner--lightbeam. The scanner is lightweight, compact, and economical because it doesn't operate with expensive laser projection, but uses a special stocking, the patented MagicalSkin, and a USB 2.0 industrial camera, the uEye, from IDS Imaging Development Systems (Obersulm, Germany; www.ids-imaging.de) instead of expensive stereo cameras.

The special stocking with photogrammetric markings is pulled over the customer's foot. Then the customer steps onto the scanner platform and a click of the mouse starts the measuring process. The camera records the photogrammetric markings and transfers them to the PC in approximately 25 s. The image-processing software delivers a precise, three-dimensional representation of the foot.

Using USB 2.0 interface, the uEye camera can be connected directly to a laptop or PC without requiring additional hardware. Its high bus bandwidth allows a data transfer rate of up to 480 Mbits/s. If necessary, images from several cameras can be simultaneously recorded and displayed on the PC. With a resolution of up to 3.1 Mpixels, the cameras can record up to 75 frames/s in full mode. Higher frame rates are possible in area-of-interest mode.

Both monochrome and color cameras with rolling or global shutter are available, supplied with or without memory. All models are equipped with a universal, optically decoupled trigger input and an optically decoupled output that can be used, for example, to activate a flash.

All uEye cameras support the current Windows operating systems and Linux. A software-development kit with demo programs for image recording and analysis, and the source code for them written in C/C++, are supplied free with each camera.