High-Resolution Circumferential Tire Tread Three-Dimensional Profiling Using Laser Section Technique and Photometric Stereo Technique 02-13-01-0001

This article presents an approach for circumferential tire tread profiling using Laser Section (LS) technique and Photometric Stereo (PS) technique. The proposed approach uses a digital camera as the only data acquisition device, and one laser line generator and sixteen 5 mm white LEDs to provide different lighting conditions. LS technique uses the illumination of the laser line generator to measure the depth profile of one cross section of the tire surface, while PS technique utilizes the difference of the appearance of the tire surface under different lighting conditions to recover the geometry information of the tire tread with pixel resolution. The fusion of the two techniques results in a high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) profiling of the tire tread. A system to apply the proposed approach was developed, with the necessary calibration steps explained, with a step motor for circumferential measurement. The performance of the proposed approach was validated with a 225/60R16 tire using the system. As shown in the experimental result, the proposed approach has successfully measured the circumferential tire tread profiling with 31 μm spatial resolution.