Abstract

Despite the advantages of additive manufacturing, its industrial adoption remains limited by challenges related to part quality. As this quality is influenced by numerous factors, layerwise in-situ inspection has attracted increasing research interest as a means of detecting deviations during manufacturing and improving the quality of the final part.

However, unlike image-based inspection systems, those relying on point-cloud data lack a standardised procedure for identifying layer contours from digitised measurements. This paper presents a method for extracting contours from point clouds acquired by digitising additively manufactured layers, using edge-detection algorithms originally developed for image processing. The proposed procedure is experimentally validated by comparing the extracted contours with measurements obtained using a coordinate measuring machine (CMM).

Keywords

Contour detection, Point clouds, Image processing, Additive manufacturing.