Abstract: Several issues need to be solved in centerline extraction of structured light stripe, including complex shape of light stripe, uneven distribution of light intensity, gap of light strip caused by specular reflection or occlusion, and interference of environmental noise, etc. After investigating available centerline extraction algorithms, a novel centerline extraction algorithm is proposed based on anisotropic thermal diffusion equation. By corresponding pixels gray value to the temperature, the pixels with maximum values were calculated as centerline. The feasibility of solving the above issues with the proposed algorithm was verified by principle analysis and experiments. The comparison results show that the proposed algorithm has higher accuracy and efficiency.