Measuring 3-D location and shape parameters of cylinders by a spatial encoding technique

We are concerned with the problem of estimation of true cylinder radius, height, location, and orientation. We present mathematical models for measuring these location and shape parameters using a spatial encoding technique. A crucial step in the proposed method is to convert the estimation problem with complex curved stripe patterns to an equivalent, but simpler, estimation problem with line stripe patterns. The notions of silhouette edges and virtual plane are introduced. Various projective geometry techniques are applied to derive the cylinder location and shape parameters. The actual experiment apparatus is set up to employ the developed mathematical models to measure the cylinder geometric parameters. Description of the image-processing tasks for extracting perceived curved stripes and stripe endpoints is given. Sensitivity analysis and proper measures are taken to consider the effects of the uncertainties of stripe endpoints and silhouette edge locations on the measurement. Experiments have confirmed that our measurement method yields quite good results for different cylinders under various measurement environment conditions