Abstract 3D measurement techniques based on color-encoded fringe pattern projection have been widely used in various fields of engineering recently. There is one problem that the surface color of measured object may interfere with the color of projected fringe pattern. To solve this problem, a novel method based on complementary color-encoded fringe projection is proposed. Two color-encoded fringe patterns whose fringe colors are complementary are designed. The first pattern is with the sinusoidal fringe embedding into the green color channel which is used to evaluate phases by Fourier transform method. The fringe color of the captured image is established with the help of the complementary color fringe pattern, which is based on the feature of color complementation. Thus, the influence brought by the color of object surface can be eliminated, and decoding errors can be further reduced. Experiment results indicate that the proposed method is valid and can be applied to the measured colorful objects.