Structured-light (SL) techniques are noncontact approaches for measuring 3D complex objects in various applications including robotics, manufacturing and reverse engineering. An SL system is based on a triangulation configuration between the object of interest, a projector and one or more cameras. The 3D surface profile of the object is obtained from the deformation of light patterns projected onto the object. The performance of SL systems is determined by the hardware components, their triangulation configuration and the patterns used. This thesis focuses on developing, implementing and evaluating SL systems for measuring small (0.5 – 100 mm) complex objects. The contributions of this thesis are:​ 1) a design methodology for determining the optimal triangulation configuration to reduce reconstruction errors, and to maximize unique pixel-to-pixel correspondences and coverage of the measurement volume, 2) a design methodology for optimizing the pattern sequence to minimize random noise in 3D reconstruction, 3) design methodologies for SL system for micro-scale measurements using image focus fusion to increase the effective measurement volume, and 4) a novel calibration procedure for SL systems using robust regression models with the lowest predictive errors. Experiments are conducted with a variety of micro-scale objects to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies for designing SL systems for micro-scale measurements.