An Approach to the Extraction of Intersecting Pipes Weld Seam Based on 3D Point Cloud

In this paper, a method based on point cloud for weld seam extraction of intersecting pipes workpiece is proposed. Firstly, a lightweight clustering algorithm based on the normal vector direction was proposed to extract the feature points of the weld seam. After filtering the feature points, a novel key points extraction algorithm was proposed to extract the key points of the weld seam. After that, a non-Uniform Rational B-Spline curve was used to approximate the key points and the preliminary spatial weld curve was obtained. Finally, an iterative algorithm was adopted to optimize the generated weld curve. The proposed method is verified on the ideal and real intersecting pipes point cloud models. Experiments show that the proposed method has high accuracy and robustness, and can accurately extract the intersecting pipes weld seam curve, providing guidance for the subsequent accurate automatic welding.