Reliability of wood grain orientation measurements using laser illumination

This work evaluates an optical laser-based approach to measuring wood grain orientation, with results obtained by an automatic procedure. Wood grain orientation is of special importance in forest research but only manual methods have so far been available to measure the orientation of a grain within a tree. Manual methods are crude and offer only one piece of information about the angle of a piece of wood under analysis. The optical laser approach presented in this paper demonstrates an alternative procedure using laser illumination and image analysis of the inertial moment. This has major advantages in terms of reliability and robustness. The influence of laser illumination angle, the sensitivity of the analysis and the repeatability of a single sample were investigated. The results showed that the proposed method produced reliable results, and is a rapid and inexpensive alternative to the manual method.