This study proposes a simple and robust adaptive fringe projection method for the 3D measurement of highlighted surfaces. The method initially projects a uniform white pattern to help identify overexposed regions and extract boundaries. These boundaries are then mapped to a projector pixel coordinate system. The pixel intensities within the boundaries are reduced to regenerate new fringe maps with brightness distributions adapted to the sample. Finally, this process is repeated until no overexposed regions remain in the acquired images. Conventional methods use multiple exposures and adaptive projection, have complicated operations and calculations, and must capture a large number of fringe images. By contrast, the proposed method just needs to capture fewer patterns and is easier to implement. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately measure the highlighted surface of biological tissue and reconstruct complete and high-precision 3D profiles.