Review of feature boundary identification techniques for the characterization of tessellated surfaces

Tessellated surfaces are structured surfaces where the dominant features are organized in periodic patterns. Tessellated surfaces are becoming increasingly popular for a wide variety of industrial uses. However, their uptake is hindered by a lack of suitable metrological techniques to categorize and verify their properties. Areal surface texture parameters, commonly used for characterization of surface texture, may not provide relevant information for characterizing the periodicity and the other functionally relevant geometric attributes of the pattern. A recently proposed solution is to directly retrieve the individual features of the pattern and to determine their relevant geometric and dimensional properties. To identify individual features it is necessary to segment the surface in order to extract the pattern units (tiles) and the individual features contained within, so that their properties can be assessed. This paper reviews a number of different techniques to segment tessellated surfaces and compares their ability to accurately identify features and their boundaries. The ability to identify features is important as it has a direct impact on the computation of dimensional and geometric properties of the features.