Adaptive distance function and its application in free-form surface localization

Localization plays an important role in design and manufacturing of free-form surface products. Conventional iterative methods can supply an accurate result for localization, but they usually require a good initial estimate of rigid transformation. For the objects with high-curvature features, they suffer from poor accuracy or slow convergent speed. In this paper, a new distance function is defined to approximatively describe the distance between updated point and corresponding surface model. Our distance function constitutes of point-plane distance in normal direction and compensated distance in tangent plane, adaptively adjusting the objective function for optimizing the rigid transformation. The application of the adaptive distance function for localization has potential to provide high accuracy and fine convergence. The performances of our localization method are confirmed by a series of simulation experiments.