Patent ID: 9665793
Date: 2017-05-30
CPC Classifications: G01B,G06K,G06T

Claim:
1. A method for contactless measurements of a vehicle wheel assembly, comprising: projecting a pattern of light into a stationary field of view; acquiring a sequence of images of said stationary field of view as the vehicle wheel assembly either rotates, or rotates and translates, through said projected pattern of light; processing said acquired sequence of images to identify at least a portion of each image associated with surfaces of said vehicle wheel assembly illuminated by said projected pattern; establishing for each image portion, a point cloud of non-descript three-dimensional data points corresponding to said illuminated surfaces of the vehicle wheel assembly contained within said image portion; optimizing at least two of said point clouds of non-descript three-dimensional data points to compensate for an effect of wheel rotation, and if said wheel is translating, for an effect of wheel translation, between associated images in said sequence, said optimization rotationally aligning said at least two point clouds of non-descript three-dimensional data points to maximize a spatial density of data points in a merged representation of said at least two associated point clouds; and identifying an axis of rotation for the vehicle wheel assembly utilizing each of said optimized point clouds.