Reliability of wood grain orientation by laser illumination

Abstract
This work presents an evaluation of an optical laser approach to measure wood grain orientation, with results obtained by an automatic procedure. Wood grain orientation has a special importance in forest research , and one limitation has been that only manual ways to measure the orientation of a grain within a tree have been available. These manual methods are crude and offer only one piece of information about the angle of a piece of wood under analysis. The optical laser approach presented in this paper evaluated an alternative procedure using laser and image analysis of the inertial moment, which has major advantages of reliability and robustness. We investigated the influence of laser illumination angle, the sensitivity of the analysis and the repeatability of a single sample. The results showed that our proposal presented reliable results, and is a fast and cheap alernative to the manual method.
Year
2008
Category
Refereed journal