Surface inspection planning for laser line scanners

The important role of automated visual methods in industrial product inspection necessitates the design of optimized and precise measurement setups. Due to the high dimensionality of the design space, the manual choice of the geometrical and optical parameters is tedious and often not optimal. In this article we study the problem of inspection planning for laser line scanners which are affordable and widely-used inspection tools. To this end, the measurement model is defined and appropriate evaluation metrics are introduced, which formulate the optimization problem in terms of a number of constrains and cost functions. Visibility analysis, lateral resolution, range resolution, and the measurement uncertainty are of the main metrics we cover. Computer graphics simulations are utilized to simulate the measurement in different setup configurations and estimate the evaluation metrics. We also propose a general uncertainty model which can be applied for modeling the uncertainty in laser scanners. The optimum laser scanner setup can be achieved by optimizing the defined evaluation metrics using a multi-objective approach.