Although digital manufacturing has become an inevitable trend

the lofting template will still play an important role in aircraft manufacturing. Improving the productivity and quality of traditional mode is a subject that requires careful study. Concerning the problems existing in lofting templates inspection

an automatic inspection algorithm based on three-dimensional laser scanning is proposed. For the scribed line

the point cloud of the template is rasterized

the scribed line is roughly extracted according to the height information

and the extraction result is refined by using normal information according to the characteristics of the scribed line. For the shape contour

the edge is extracted from the binary image converted from the point cloud. The result of extraction is registered with CAD digital model

the noise is removed

and the error distribution is printed out by calculating the error between the digital model and the extraction result. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the existing algorithm in accuracy and efficiency

which is more reliable and efficient than manual inspection. The proposed method has certain value of application in practical engineering.