A novel method for internal feature reconstruction based on infrared thickness measurement

This paper presents a novel method to reconstruct the internal structures of a mechanical part based on 2D thickness measurement from an Infrared (IR) measurement system. Conventionally, the internal structures are measured by X-Ray imaging techniques but those methods suffer from large measurement errors (higher than 0.125 mm). Using an innovative fixture, this new method first registers the 2D thickness measurement data with a 3D CAD model or a 3D point cloud representing the external feature of the measured part, and then reconstructs the internal features based on the thickness information from IR system. Experimental results shows this new method provides significantly high accuracy compared with X-Ray imaging techniques.