Patent Document ID: 10115035
Application ID: 14592133
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for employing a vision system to dynamically inspect an object in a field of view, comprising: capturing three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data of the field of view; transforming each point of the 3D point cloud data into a plurality of tangential surface vectors; determining surface normal vectors for each point of the 3D point cloud data based upon the plurality of tangential surface vectors; detecting distribution peaks in the surface normal vectors employing a unit sphere mesh, including inscribing an icosahedron into the unit sphere mesh and recursively subdividing each triangle therein to generate triangulations having a multiplicity of triangle facets and mesh vertices and detecting the distribution peaks based thereon; separating parallel planes using the detected distribution peaks, wherein separating the parallel planes includes executing, using a controller, a radially bounded nearest neighbor strategy combined with a process of nearest neighbor searching based upon cell division to segment the separated parallel planes in the same orientation into a plurality of planar patches; and identifying a planar surface of the object based upon the segmented planar patches.