Control Point Position Calibration for Light Pen Coordinate Measuring System

State Key Laboratory of Precision Measuring Technology and Instruments, Tianjin University, 300072 Tianjin, China

^* Corresponding author: senwang@tju.edu.cn

Abstract

Light pen coordinate measuring system is a kind of vision-based portable coordinate measuring technique. It implements coordinate measuring by analyzing the image of light pen, which has several control points. With the relative positons of the control points determined and the pixel coordinates of their image points acquired by image processing, the posture of light pen can be obtained by solving perspective- n-point problem. Therefore, the control point positons serve as the measuring basis of the whole system. However, the accuracy of existing calibration methods is not satisfactory. In this paper, a new method of control point positon calibration, which utilizes traditional coordinate measuring machine, is proposed. The light pen is fasten to the measuring arm of a coordinate measuring machine and moves along a three dimensional grid route driven by the machine. A stationary camera is located in front of the machine to capture the image of light pen at each node of the route. For each control point, an individual coordinate system is established. Then the relative positions of control points can be transformed into the differences of a series of translation vectors. Experiments show that, with the proposed method, the accuracy of light pen coordinate measuring system can reach 30m within 10 meters.