A method of image processing in a structured light imaging device is provided that includes receiving a captured image of a scene, wherein the captured image is captured by a camera of a projector-camera pair in the structured light imaging system, and wherein the captured image includes a pre-determined hierarchical binary pattern projected into the scene by the projector, wherein the pre-determined hierarchical binary pattern was formed by iteratively scaling a lower resolution binary pattern to multiple successively higher resolutions, rectifying the captured image to generated a rectified captured image, extracting a binary image from the rectified captured image at full resolution and at each resolution used to generate the pre-determined hierarchical binary pattern, and using the binary images to generate a depth map of the captured image.