A method for intraoral imaging acquires structured light images from a region of interest and forms a range image that characterizes the surface contour of the region of interest according to the acquired structured light images. At least one row of pixels in the range image is processed by selecting a segment of the row, computing residual noise in the selected segment, generating a template for the segment, wherein the template is characteristic of an imaging artifact related to motion, computing a similarity factor according to correlation between frequency-domain transforms of the template and computed residual noise and comparing the computed similarity factor against a threshold to identify an image artifact. The image artifact or excessive motion are reported.
