Abstract

Multiscale complex surfaces possessing high form accuracy and geometric complexity are widely used in various applications such as telecommunications and biomedical applications. Despite the development of multi-sensor technology, the stringent requirements of the form accuracy and surface finish have still imposed a lot of challenges in their measurement and characterization. This paper presents a fiducial-aided data fusion method (FADFM) which attempts to address the challenge in modelling and fusion of the datasets from multi-scale complex surfaces. The FADFM makes use of fiducials such as standard spheres as reference data to form a fiducial-aided computer-aided design (FA-CAD) of the multiscale complex surface which establishes an intrinsic surface feature as well as unifying different coordinate systems among different measured datasets. The B-spline surface is used to identify overlapping areas of the registered datasets. Hence, a fused surface model is developed which takes into account both the fitted surface residuals and the fitted fiducial residuals based on Gaussian process modelling. A preliminary experiment has been conducted to verify the technical feasibility of the proposed FADFM. The results reveal that the FADFM is technically feasible to fuse measured complex datasets with reduction of the measurement uncertainty and computation cost.