A Comparative Study of Extraction Cylinder Features in Industrial Point Clouds

With the technological advancement in the field of Computer Aided Design such as the rapid development of scanning technologies, the reconstruction of complete and incomplete cylinders given noisy point clouds with form defects becomes an important issue. In fact, cylindrical surfaces are found in domestic to industrial contexts. In this paper, a comparative study of cylinder fitting algorithms manufactured in the LIPPS laboratory is proposed. The aim of the proposed approach is to determine the diameter of cylindrical feature for minimizing roundness error from experimental data-points. The roundness error is evaluated using two internationally defined methods: Minimum Circumscribed Cylinder (MCC) and Maximum Inscribed Cylinder (MIC). All algorithms give similar results in the case where the scanned cylinder is complete and without form defects, but in the case of missing data some algorithms give unacceptable results. The two reference cylinders have been independently analyzed, respecting six criteria (calculation complexity, damping parameter, initial guess, time, circularity error and complexity cylinder). The results of algorithms are also compared to help manufacturers and inspectors facilitate and improve the application of these methods and to select the appropriate algorithm for size and form evaluation.