A novel method for measuring the volume and surface area of egg

摘要

The geometric parameters of egg such as volume and surface area have great significance in poultry industry and biological studies. Traditional manual detection method is usually laborious or unable to meet the needs of actual production. A novel method to establish three-dimensional model by multi-angle images have been proposed in this paper in order to measure the volume and surface area of egg. Field calibration method was presented by planar calibration grid to obtain the camera parameters, for improving the dimensional measurement precision of the egg; PhotoModeler was a software application that created accurate three-dimensional point cloud (3DPC) based on images, the egg photos were taken from multi-angle, then obtained the 3DPC of egg by PhotoModeler; established three-dimensional model of egg by refinement algorithm based on incremental Delaunay triangulation, achieved the measurement of surface area and volume of the egg by calculating the surface area of the triangular facets and volume of the tetrahedrons that constituted the egg model in Matlab, by using Monte Carlo, from a sample of eggs, the correction of volume could be estimated. For performance comparison, experiments on the drainage method based on Archimedes' principle and the proposed multi-angle modeling measurement method were conducted, and the experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved a high precision up to 99%, indicated that the proposed method effect good, be conveniently and had high precision. With slight modification, the developed approach could be adapted to various applications concerning volume and surface area measurement of plants or animals products using photometric approach. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.