Visualizing sphere-contacting areas on automobile parts for ECE inspection

To satisfy safety regulations of Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), the surface regions of automobile parts must have a sufficient degree of roundness if there is any chance that they could contact a sphere of 50.0 mm radius (exterior parts) or 82.5 mm radius (interior parts). In this paper, a new offset-based method is developed to automatically detect the possible sphere-contacting shape of such parts. A polyhedral model that precisely approximates the part shape is given as input, and the offset shape of the model is obtained as the Boolean union of the expanded shapes of all surface triangles. We adopt a triple-dexel representation of the 3D model to enable stable and precise Boolean union computations. To accelerate the dexel operations in these Boolean computations, a new parallel processing method with a pseudo-list structure and axis-aligned bounding box is developed. The possible sphere-contacting shape of the part surface is then extracted from the offset shape as a set of points or a set of polygons.