U.S. Patent Office Awards CAItech U.S. 6,064,759

San Jose, CA, May 14, 2001 - The U.S. Patent Office has awarded CAItech U.S. Patent 6,064,759 for their 3D inspection machine.  The patent covers 3D inspection methods with sensors that rely on "structured light machine vision".  Sensors such as laser triangulation sensors, confocal optics sensors and Moire pattern sensors all rely on sructured light to illuminate an object and machine vision to detect the location of points on its surface from light it reflects.

The patent is jointly held by CAItech President Dr. Shawn Buckley and three co-inventors from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Wuhan, China).  The three Chinese co-inventors are Dr. Chen Jihong, President of Huazhong CNC Co., Ltd. (Wuhan, China), Dr. Yang Daoshan, Manager of Software Development at Huazhong CNC and Dr. Zhou Huicheng, NC Institute of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Wuhan, China).   All the inventors have licenced the technology they co-developed to CAItech on an exclusive worldwide basis.

CAItech, a Silicon Valley manufacturer, uses the technology of U.S. 6,064,759 for its 3D scanning and inspection machines.  The patent is primarily directed toward analysis of the set of scanned points on a part, called the "datacloud".  The datacloud is first analyzed to find which portions belong to categories of surfaces called primitives.  Primitives include simple surface types such as the plane, hole, sphere and cylinder but also more complex surface types as the spline, helix and cone.

Once the datacloud of a part is converted to primitives, other algorithms extract the part's dimensions.  For example, if the part is a solid prismatic block, it's width can be found by subtracting the location of a plane on one side from the location of a plane on the other side.  More important, once the relationships between primitives are found for a part, dimensions of similar parts with unknown dimensions can be found by applying the same algorithms to the unknown parts' dataclouds.

Computer Aided Inspection Technologies, Inc. is a privately held California corporation manufacturing next-generation automated inspection equipment. Established in 1997, CAItech is located in San Jose, CA in the heart of California's Silicon Valley electronics industry.
CAItech can be reached at (408) 226-0642, or on the web at www.caitech.com .