Adaptation of Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment Methods for Automatic Visual Evaluation of the Surface Quality of 3D Prints

Automatic visual quality assessment of the 3D printed surfaces is currently one of the most demanding challenges in additive manufacturing. Regardless of the applications of the computer vision for the 3D printing process monitoring purposes, a reliable surface quality evaluation during manufacturing may introduce brand new possibilities. The detection of some distortions and their automatic evaluation can be helpful when deciding to stop the process to save time, energy, and filament. In some cases, some further corrections can also be made for relatively small distortions. Since many general-purpose image quality assessment methods have been proposed in recent years, their applications for the quality evaluation in the additive manufacturing are investigated. As most of the metrics are full-reference and require the availability of the original perfect quality image, their direct application is not possible. Therefore, their adaptation is described in the paper together with experimental verification of classification results obtained using various metrics.