A Multisensor Data Fusion Method Based on Gaussian Process Model for Precision Measurement of Complex Surfaces

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Jan 3;20(1):278. doi: 10.3390/s20010278.

Abstract

As multisensor measurement technology is rapidly applied in industrial production, one key issue is the data fusion procedure by combining several datasets from multiple sensors to obtain the overall geometric measurement. In this paper, a multisensor data fusion method based on a Gaussian process model is proposed for complex surface measurements. A robust surface registration method based on the adaptive distance function is firstly used to unify the coordinate systems of different measurement datasets. By introducing an adjustment model, the residuals between several independent datasets from different sensors are then approximated to construct a Gaussian process model-based data fusion system. The proposed method is verified through both simulation verification and actual experiments, indicating that the proposed method can fuse multisensor measurement datasets with better fusion accuracy and faster computational efficiency compared to the existing method.

Keywords: Gaussian process model; adaptive distance function; complex surface measurement; data fusion; data registration.