A novel centerline extraction algorithm for a laser stripe applied for turbine blade inspection

Line-laser 3D scanning is a novel and promising automation technique for turbine blade inspection. One key task encountered in line-laser 3D scanning is centerline extraction of the laser stripes. In some regions, there is asymmetry of the line profiles caused by high curvature, such as the leading and trailing edges of a blade. According to the asymmetric Gaussian distribution line profile, this paper presents a new algorithm to extract the centerline of a laser stripe based on sub-pixel boundary extraction and medial axis transformation. The candidate boundary points of the laser stripe are extracted by zero crossing. Based on Taylor expansion and interpolation, the gray gradient distribution of the boundary can be estimated accurately. Following this, the accurate boundary points are extracted by extreme values of the gray gradient, and the centerline is calculated by medial axis transformation of the accurate boundary points. The proposed method can effectively reduce errors caused by the asymmetry of line profiles in areas of high curvature. The effectiveness of this method is verified using simulation and measuring experiments. The experiment results show that the extraction error of the asymmetric Gaussian line profile is within ± 0.15 pixels, and the root mean square error in measurement accuracy experiments does not exceed 0.015 mm.