Developing digital twins of multi-camera metrology systems in Blender

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Blender is an open-source three-dimensional animation software, which can be used as a simulation tool in metrology, to build numerical models that can be used in the design and optimisation of camera-based measurement systems. In this work, the relevance of using Blender to model camera-based measurement systems was explored. Two experiments were conducted in real-world and Blender modelled environments, one using individual cameras for a simple measurement task, the other considering multi-camera position optimisation. The objective was to verify whether the virtual cameras created in Blender can perceive and measure objects in the same manner as the real cameras in an equivalent environment. The results demonstrate that in its native modelling format Blender satisfies the optical metrology characteristics of measurement, but the correlation between Blender output and real-world results is highly sensitive to initial modelling parameters such as illumination intensity, camera definitions and object surface texture.