Analysis of free form surface registration

Registration of a rigid body is an essential step in many machine vision tasks. This paper presents performance analysis of the iterative closest point method implemented for dimensional inspection of free form surfaces where the set of measured points is registered to a NURBS model. The results were obtained through Monte Carlo simulation. A large number of experiments were performed on an example precision engineering component. Influences of shape, number of measured points and measurement noise on registration accuracy are identified through statistical analysis.