Recognition of quadratic surface of revolution using a robotic vision system

Reverse engineering using 3D scanners has been gaining increasing popularity. One challenging task that remains is to recognize the geometric feature from the cloud data scanned. In this study, a robotic vision system is used to recognize quadratic surfaces of revolution on an object.The top-view image of an object is used to detect the surface boundary by loop analysis technique. The boundary of a single surface is extracted according to the 2D loop of that surface. The robot then projects laser lines through the principal axes of the loop to get the sectional curves. The surface is recognized by a curve-fitting method based on the characteristics of these curves.This study provides a simple and faster method to detect the manufacture features on an object that contains quadratic surfaces. The data structure can be output in IGES format for re-design or rapid manufacture of the object.