Automatic defect detection and the estimation of nominal profiles based on spline for free-form surface parts

An inspection process is a bottle neck in remanufacturing industry. This work is currently done by skilled worker that leads to human dependency and product expansion difficulty. This paper introduces a novel method for automatically identifying defects and estimating the nominal profile of measured data via spline technique. The measured profile is first split into nominal data and defect feature data through spline piecewise functions. The nominal profile data is then fitted to estimate the nominal profile. Validation results show that the proposed method is feasible to build an automatic inspection system for remanufacturing industry.