Camera based precision measurement in improving measurement accuracy

•The developed system is very useful in practical application to improve surface measurement.•The system can be applied to control the measurement stylus.•It can store the measurement data in terms of image, video and .txt and .rtf files.•It enhances safety for the human being.•It is applicable for monitoring the whole measurement system.

This paper presents a vision based software system which is developed in order to improve the precision measurement in machining technology. Precision measurement, monitoring and control are very important in manufacturing technology. In order to increase the accuracy of the measurement system; application of camera or vision is very useful. Automatic control is also vital for the measurement performance to be improved. During measurement of the gear profile; human monitoring sometimes may face danger as this is a stylus contact scanning system and the stylus is very small and thin as well as the probe moves with a maximum speed of 10 mm/s. The existing methods for gear measurement are either time consuming or expensive. This paper presents the successful implementation of the vision system in precision engineering which saves times and increases safety of the measurement system with the increment of the measurement performance. Color based stylus tracking algorithm is implemented in order to acquire better performance of the developed system. Stylus tracking based measurement is the key issue of the present research.