Tycho Groche, Jörg Seewig

• An important tool for the functional characterization of technical surfaces are envelope estimation techniques. This paper describes a new method for generating profile envelope lines based on a simplified beam-surface contact model with intuitive parameterization. The method is closely related to spline filters and shares some of their positive characteristics such as smoothness and robustness against isolated outliers. Unlike spline filters, the proposed method does not calculate mean lines, but envelope lines. Several examples of calculated profile envelopes of sintered surfaces are shown and a comparison with morphological methods, the state-of-the-art method for envelope estimation, is presented.