The Study of Ice Thickness Precise Real-Time Measurement for Airplane Sensor

In this paper, a precise computer vision measurement system which is used to measure the thickness and icing speed of airplane external sensor parts in wind tunnel is introduced. The real-time measurement system is composed of two digital cameras, a computer, a coding scale control board and an illumination lamp-house. Digital cameras are set above the glass window of the wind tunnel and focused to the sensor part. Images of the growing ice will be transferred into the control computer continuously and be processed by the software. Horizontal direction extent of growing ice can be measured with one camera and three dimensions length measured with two cameras, which forms a stereo vision system. The ice thickness could be measured from each image, and then the icing speed can be obtained from the image sequence. Experiments show that the measurement accuracy of growing ice thickness can reach 0.1 millimeter in all direction with the developed system.