Measuring propeller blade width using binocular stereo vision

Abstract

Propeller blade width measurement has been extensively studied in the past using direct and indirect methods, and it plays a great role in determining the quality of the finished products. It has surveyed that previous techniques are usually time-consuming and erroneous due to a large number of points to be processed in blade width measurement. This paper proposes a new method of measuring blade width using two images acquired from different viewpoints of the same blade. And a new feature points matching approach for propeller blade image is proposed in stereo vision measurement. Based on these, pixel coordinates of contour points of the blade in two images are extracted and converted to real world coordinates by image algorithm and binocular stereo machine vision theory. Then, from the real world coordinates, the blade width at any position can be determined by simple geometrical method.