Aircraft Pipe Gap Inspection on Raw Point Cloud From a Single View

The pipe is a common part of aviation equipment. The pipe gap is one of the important factors that affect the safety of an aviation equipment system. It is crucial to quickly and accurately measure the gaps among the pipes within the aviation equipment. Due to the complexity of the aviation pipeline system, inspecting the spacing efficiently among different pipes is challenging. In this article, we propose an effective method to inspect the gaps among aircraft pipes over the raw point data from a single view. First, we design a probe function to extract the information of pipe structures based on the cylinder feature consistency among proximity patches. The probe function is intended to avoid the interference of other structures and also provides an appropriate starting location when extracting the pipe structure information. We then design a growth guidance strategy based on the continuity of pipe axial directions, which can ensure the continuity and accuracy of pipe centerline extraction. Since the curved smooth pipe can be subdivided into many straight cylinders, we devise an adaptive growing method, which can ensure the centerline extraction efficiency of multicurvature aviation pipes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of inspection accuracy and efficiency.