Quality control and refinement of car-body surfaces

Abstract

The quality of the car-body surfaces is evaluated in the design phase. For that purpose, sensitive methods were developed; these are mainly the evaluation of the shape and distribution of reflection lines or highlight lines. In the paper, we propose a method to semi-automatically evaluate and improve the quality of the highlight line structures. Following the selection of the defective highlight line segments, the correction is carried out in two steps. First, sequences of evaluation points are computed to quantify the error in terms of distance and angle functions. Next, the corrected highlight points are calculated, and based on these points the corrected highlight line segments are constructed. The correspondence between the shape of the highlight lines and the surface parameters is highly complicated and strongly nonlinear. In the paper, a genetic process is proposed for the computation of the parameters of the surfaces, that corresponds to the corrected highlight line structure. Application of the method is demonstrated by correction of the highlight line structure and the shape of several car-body surfaces.