Comparison of surface detection methods to evaluate cone beam computed tomography data for three dimensional metrology
Christoph Heinzl, Johann Kastner, Bernd Georgi, Hubert Lettenbauer · 2007
X-ray computed tomography (CT) is a well established method for non-destructive testing. In recent years the application of CT for three dimensional measurements and variance comparison became more and more important, since CT can measure both outer and inner geometries within a rather short time. Because of the much higher measurement speed and thus lower costs especially cone beam CT is an important issue of research in the field of dimensional metrology. One of the biggest challenges for the application of CT for metrology is the accurate detection of the surface between material and air or the interface between two different materials. By using a test-body various algorithms and data evaluation methods are compared and discussed within this paper. The investigated methods are: 1. Common methods: Otsu global threshold and an empirically determined best isosurface. 2. Pipeline model: The pipeline model uses common 3D image processing filters and consists of three major steps: a.) an edge preserving diffusion filter to reduce noise without blurring the edges of the specimen. b.) A watershed segmentation filter is applied to the gradient image of the dataset to extract a fully connected binary volume. c.) The object surface is constructed using