Precise curved surface area measurement with a light-pen vision measurement system

A novel measurement scheme for a three dimensional (3D) curved surface area is proposed. This scheme consists of three steps. First, a light-pen single-camera 3D coordinate vision measurement system is devised to obtain the 3D coordinates of a detected curved surface. Second, an improved 3D deformable surface model is applied to converge to the curved surface accurately. Finally, for the convergent deformable surface, the surface area is computed using an integration scheme based on a two-triangle area computation. An experiment on a small curved surface area measurement indicates that this scheme's measurement repetition error decreases to 0.5%, when the parametric step lengths of the deformable surface are 0.1.