Edge-based cover recognition and tracking method for an AR-aided aircraft inspection system

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Edge-based cover recognition and tracking method for an AR-aided aircraft inspection system Xu Yang 1 & Xiumin Fan 1 & Jikai Wang 1 & Xuyue Yin 1 & Shiguang Qiu 2 Received: 14 June 2020 / Accepted: 19 October 2020 # Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract Cabin hatch cover plays an important role for a typical aircraft to ensure the aircraft quality and flight safety. In the test flight inspection and routine maintenance of an aircraft, one crucial step is to open cabin hatch covers one by one for detailed inspection. Authorized operators suffer from difficulties to recognize different covers with similar shapes and different inspection requirements. In this paper, an edge-based cover recognition and tracking method is proposed to recognize different hatch covers with similar shapes. First, a fast edge feature is proposed to describe image contours with simple geometric constraints. Second, based on the edge feature, a novel cover descriptor, consisting of shape and position description vectors, is presented to recognize those different covers with similar shapes. Third, on the basis of recognized cover landmarks, a direct visual odometry–based camera tracking method is presented to improve the robustness of cover recognition. The experiments are implemented in a piece of simplified mockup of aircraft cabin skin, and the results show that the proposed method has good practicability and real-time property. Meanwhile, the tracking accuracy is also good enough in the augmented reality inspection environment. Keywords Augmented reality . Edge feature . Cover recognition . Camera tracking . Cover landmark

1 Introduction For a typical aircraft, a thorough inspection is implemented to ensure the aircraft quality and flight safety in its first test trail flight inspection and routine maintenance. A large number of * Xiumin Fan [email protected] Xu Yang [email protected] Jikai Wang [email protected] Xuyue Yin [email protected] Shiguang Qiu [email protected] 1

Institute of Intelligent Manufacturing and Information Engineering, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800 Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai City, People’s Republic of China

2

Chengdu Aircraft Industry (Group) Co. Ltd., Aviation Industry Corporation of China, No.88, Weiyi Road, Huangtianba, Qingyang District, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, People’s Republic of China

electronic devices are mainly installed in electronic cabins, which are distributed discretely throughout the aircraft surface skin. One crucial step is to open all the cabin hatch covers one by one for accurate and detailed pickup inspection, which eliminates the possible problems of device installation to the greatest extent. Figure 1 shows some typical cabin hatch covers of aircraft from which it can be clearly seen that different hatch covers may have similar shapes. Even today, the pickup inspection of electronic devices installed in electronic cabins is mainly implemented by authorized operators, visually an