Steel Tube Cross Section Geometry Measurement by 3D Scanning

In this paper we describe a system aimed at obtaining several geometric measures from seamless steel tubes representative of their manufacturing quality. Traditionally, these measurements are taken manually using calipers and similar tools, which are error-prone and have low reproducibility. We introduce a system based on 3D scanning and computational geometry. Scanning adds surface noise and may leave small undetectable gaps depending on surface properties, and the tube itself may have small defects not representative of the overall tube shape. Also, processing high resolution scans containing millions of points can be too time consuming. Thus, special algorithms are needed to make the problem tractable and produce representative measures in a reasonable time.