An innovative and flexible approach to visual inspection

摘要

Existing vision base insepction deivces exhibit a number of significant limitations, which have tended to preclude wider industrial application. These include a highly viewer centred two dimensional (2D) approach to inspection, resulting in dedicated and inflexible machine vision systems, an inability to isolate chromatic / albedo and topographic patterns, making the inspection of complex textured surfaces, such as natural stone, wood and leather, highly problematic, and a need for strict environmentla structuring, further serving to limit systme flexibility. An alternative approach involving an innovative and flexible technique has been developed for the three dimensional (3D) inspection of a wide range of products, previously considered difficult or impossible to inspect using conventioanl methds of machine vision.A fixed generic lighting configuraiton is used to isolate coincident surface chromatic patterns from 3D topographic features. The approach is object centred, and largely insensitive to variation in object pose. The work has been undertaken in collaboration with two industrial partners. Experimental results are presented in the paper.