Reverse engineering in industrial applications using laser stripe triangulation

In many fields of industry it is necessary to obtain shape information from physical objects. The diversity of items which need to be measured is huge but their shape properties can be broadly classified into two categories: regular, consisting of planes, cylinders and so on, or free-form, where the surface shape is considerably more complex to describe. The two most common uses of surface shape information are for inspection, that is the comparison of the object geometry against the nominal size, or for reverse engineering, the determination of the object geometry where no nominal data exists. This paper presents a system for the reverse engineering of free-form surfaces for industrial applications