Machine Vision and Data Reconstruction for Measuring Free Form Surface

Abstract

Reverse engineering of free-form surfaces is one of the most challenging technologies in advanced manufacturing. With the development of industry more and more sculptured surfaces, such as molds and turbine blades, are required to measure quickly and accurately. Optical non-contact probes possess many advantages, such as high speed, no measuring force, in comparison with contact ones. The ability of stereovision probe with CCD cameras in gathering a large amount of information simultaneously makes it the most popularly used one in sculptured surface measurements. So based on the laser triangular principle, a measuring and testing device with two CCD cameras was designed, and its accuracy was analyzed. With a virtual 3D target in form of a grid plate, all the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of CCD camera including the uncertainty of image scale factor and optical center of camera can be readily calibrated. In order to obtain all the required data with high accuracy in a short time, the curvature-based adaptive sampling strategy is presented. Due to huge amount of arbitrary scattered points, the Delaunay triangular division and Bezier interpolation and NURBS interpolation are applied to get a continuous surface.