A hierarchical search-based method for extracting boundary feature lines of aircraft skin

Boundary feature line extraction is a critical step in the milling process of aircraft skin. By accurately extracting these boundary feature lines, the milling quality of the edges can be improved, and the seam gaps during skin assembly can be reduced. In this paper, we present a hierarchical search structure designed to extract boundary feature lines from raw point cloud data. We conducted experiments on synthetic models and actual scanned workpiece point cloud data using different boundary extraction algorithms. We visualized and quantitatively analyzed the extraction results. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other approaches and is suitable for application in the milling processes of the aerospace industry.