Monocular Vision-based Calibration Method for Determining Frequency Characteristics of Low-Frequency Vibration Sensors

Calibration is required to determine the frequency characteristics of vibration sensors to ensure their measurement accuracy in engineering applications. Thus, a monocular vision-based calibration method for low-frequency vibration sensors is investigated in this study. A sub-pixel edge detection method which based on Gaussian curve fitting is applied to extract the edges of motion sequence images in order to accurately measure the excitation acceleration of the sensors. Because the motion sequence images and the output signal of the sensors cannot be collected synchronously, it is very difficult to align the excitation acceleration signal obtained from the images and the output signal in the time domain. Although the misalignment only has a negligible effect on the magnitude frequency characteristic calibration, it dramatically decreases the calibration accuracy of the phase frequency characteristic, especially with the increasing of the frequency. A time-spatial synchronization technique is proposed to accurately calibrate the phase frequency characteristic by determining the phase of the excitation acceleration signal at a specific spatial position and that of the output signal at the corresponding time. Finally, both the magnitude and phase frequency characteristics are simultaneously calibrated by the investigated method with a flexible and low-cost vision system. The experimental results compared with laser interferometry show that the investigated method accomplishes the high-accuracy magnitude and phase frequency characteristics calibration in a broad low-frequency range. Its calibration accuracy is superior to that of laser interferometry when the frequency is less than 0.3 Hz, and is equivalent at other frequencies.