Data-driven learning for calibrating galvanometric laser scanners

State-of-the-art calibration very often constructs models motivated by a real-world device. Recently, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been proposed as a more universal, accurate, and practical black-box approach. For a galvanometric triangulation device based on two mirrors, we embrace this proposal and set it into context with other supervised data-driven approaches: 1) ridge regression; 2) support vector regression; and 3) Gaussian processes. We show that they outperform available model-based approaches and yield similar performance compared with a memorizing lookup table calibration. The results demonstrate that an off-the-shelf usage of ANNs may run into generalization problems. Restricting the space of functions using kernel-based learning has proven to be advantageous. Finally, all approaches and distinct properties are discussed in a broader context, since each application entails differently relevant requirements for its calibration. This also holds for any calibration other than the considered triangulation device.