Development of a photogrammetry system for the measurement of rotationally symmetric forgings

Abstract

The paper presents the development of a system for the measurement of the shapes and dimensions of rotationally symmetric forgings under high temperature. These large semi-finished products are measured with demands for accuracy on the order of millimeters. The challenge is to design a measurement system that overcomes the problems caused by high temperature and provides results instantly without interrupting the production process. The proposed approach exploits the fact, that the measured parts have simple rotationally symmetric shape. It is based on the assumption that (in the simplest case) the actual shape can be determined from four boundary curves which lie in two mutually perpendicular planes. These four boundary curves can be obtained by determining the edges of the forging in two images. The proposed approach has been incorporated into a software application created in Matlab programming environment. Hence the system does not use added illumination resolving edge detection and scale calculation is a crucial step. The main parts of the system, such as calibration, edge detection, spatial orientation, and the evaluation of information about the shapes and dimensions of the measured parts, have been designed so that the entire measurement process takes only a few seconds. The article focuses on the individual parts of the software application. It discusses the suitability of using particular mathematical models and the designed multi-step edge detection method, which is based on thresholding, directional median filtering and validation and correction of detected edge points.