Monocular Structured-Light Sensing for 3D Metallic Hole Measurement

Non-contact metric inspection of metallic circular holes is essential for assembly quality control, yet remains difficult on reflective machined surfaces, where depth scale, stripe radiometry, and contour geometry degrade simultaneously. Pure monocular two-dimensional vision localizes hole boundaries efficiently but cannot resolve metric depth; multi-camera three-dimensional systems remove this ambiguity but with a heavier hardware and calibration cost; and conventional structured-light pipelines often improve stripe extraction or circle fitting in isolation, leaving the overall measurement chain fragile when reflection and edge defects co-occur. This paper proposes a monocular structured-light framework that treats sensing geometry, radiometric stripe reliability, and outlier-robust hole estimation as one coupled measurement chain. A single calibrated industrial camera is combined with an obliquely projected line laser to fuse top-view contour observation with light-plane-constrained depth recovery. Multi-exposure high-dynamic-range (HDR) fusion, adaptive Gaussian regularization, and distance-weighted gray-centroid refinement stabilize sub-pixel stripe centerlines under local saturation and uneven illumination, while geometry-aware contour screening and probabilistic multi-stage RANSAC fitting suppress burr-induced outliers during circle-parameter estimation. Experiments were conducted on a steel bolt-hole workpiece and a 6061 aluminum-alloy plate containing five holes with nominal diameters spanning approximately 30–78 mm. The original steel workpiece was evaluated for its diameter and two datum-related center-position quantities, while the five-hole plate was evaluated through three repeated optical diameter measurements and independent CMM references. For the five aluminum-alloy holes, the mean optical–CMM diameter differences ranged from 0.006 to 0.218 mm, with an average absolute difference of 0.096 mm. The results establish feasibility over the tested workpieces and calibrated measurement volume rather than generalization to arbitrary hole geometries, materials, or surface conditions.