South China University of Technology Guangzhou, China bliu@scut.edu.cn; wushengjin@tom.com
Dongguan Janus Group Corp., Ltd.
Dongguan, China zoushifang@janusgroup.cn
AbstractIt is very necessary to detect surface defects on plastic
products during production process and post treatment. The research and application of automatic detection technology of surface defects on plastic products is supposed to greatly liberate the human workforce, improve the automated production level, and has wide application prospect. The development of machine visions key technologies such as illumination system, CCD camera, image enhancement, image segmentation, image recognition, and so on has been explained in detail. Its application on detection for surface defects on plastic products such as plastic electronic components, strips, PVC building materials, films, leather, bottles, and so on is also presented briefly. Especially, it mainly focuses on the automatic detection of surface defects for injection products, and the automatic detection system is proposed. It is composed of the conveyor belt device, the image acquisition and processing software and PLC control device, et al. Keywords- Surface Defects; Plastic Products; Machine Vision; Automatic Detection
I.
INTRODUCTION
With the development of science and technology, surface
quality of plastic products is more and more required for the follow-up industry. The detection and control of surface defects has attracted plastic products manufacturers attention. The automatic detection system, which is suitable for plastic products, has significant practical significance and wide application prospect. Surface defect detection technology has been widely used as an important means of quality control. In the past, this can be done with naked-eye observation, which the job is bored, tedious and repetitive, which may make mistake. Furthermore,
Fig. 1
978-1-4244-7739-5/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE
the long-time work would do harm to the health of workers.
Today, with the new technology of automatic detection system based on machine vision, the same job can be done more effectively, costless, reliable, consistent and faster. Machine vision technology is a typical interdisciplinary subject, which involves artificial intelligence, neurobiology, psychophysics, computer science, image processing, pattern recognition and many other areas. Machine vision is mainly aimed at simulating or reproducing certain intelligent behavior concerned with human visual using computer, processing and understanding the information extracted from object images, and ultimately being used in the actual defect detection and quality control. II.
KEY TECHNIQUES AND ACTUALITIES
The machine vision system consists of light source, optical
imaging module, image capture module, image acquisition and digitization module, intelligent image processing and decision module, control and implementation module as shown in Fig.1 [1]. These modules constitute an integrated industrial machine vision system. Although the machine vision system applies many techniques, the key techniques are illumination system, camera, image enhancement, image segmentation and image recognition. The actualities of these key techniques are described as follows. A. Illumination System The performance of illumination system is essential to the machine vision system. It should be possessed of the following characteristics [2]: (1) produce significant difference between
System structure of machine vision
required detection and non-detection areas on the object by
highlighting the target feature; (2) ensure sufficient brightness and stability; (3) maintain the image quality when the object changes its position. As the detected surface is usually irregular, its roughness is variable, some products even have electrodeposit or coating surface, resulting of inconsistent reflection of light on the surface of the detected products brings various difficulties in image acquisition and processing. In order to obtain good image quality and facilitate the analysis processing, its needed to design special illumination systems for the products with different surface defects. In order to minimize the influence of surface roughness, Tang et al. [3] analyzed the relationship between illumination and defect expressivities, and between illumination and parts roughness. It was found that the relation between illumination and defect expressivities was linear. How to realize the selfadjust function of illumination was proposed to improve the capability of defect checking system. Qian et al.[4] designed a lamp-house employing MAX1698 chip. It settled two difficulties which formed on the strongly reflected and complex surface. One was that the lightness of CCD imaging menu was too strong, and the other was that the information of defect which should be detected was always lost. Fig.2 shows the optics principle schematic of cone LED light source. At present, LED lights are usually adopted as illumination source in machine vision technology. LED lights consist of spot lights, line lights, dome lights, ring lights, and so on, which can be used for different types of defects for automatic detection. Spot lights with high luminous intensity can be used for chip detection and Mark point location. Line lights with cylindrical lens, whose brightness is ultrahigh, is suitable for stepless detection on a variety of production lines, applied to linear array cameras and AOI (i.e. Automatic Online Inspecting). Dome lights with hemispherical integral side walls, can evenly reflect light emitted from the bottom in 360, and are applied to surface defect detection with convexconcave and curved surface, metal and glass with strong reflection surface. Ring lights provide different illumination angles and color combinations, highlight the 3D information of
objects better, settle the problem of the shadow aroused by
illuminating from opposite direction, are applied to defect detection for PCB boards, IC components, plastic containers et al. B. CCD Camera Currently, CCD(Charge Coupled Device) camera is widely applied in machine vision image acquisition process. Its principle of operation is as follows. CCD camera captures the images of the detected object on the imaging sensitive surface via the optical imaging system. The image illumination signals in the image sensitive units are changed into minority-carrier density signals and stored there. Then, they are transferred to the CCD shift register by transfer pulse, and moved out of the device sequentially by driving pulse and become video signals finally. CCD consists of linear array CCD and area array CCD. The linear CCD employs linear array integrated circuit as its sensor, which is fast in processing information. The follow-up processing circuit is simple and easy to achieve real-time control. However, it can only acquire 1D images, and can not process complex images. The area array CCD can capture 2D images, access to large amount of information and process complex images. Whereas, its processing speed is relatively slower and the cost is higher than the linear array CCD. The key performance parameters of CCD camera are pixel, resolution and sensitivity. Pixel determines the clarity of the displayed images. The performance of image details is better while the resolution is higher. In image processing, in order to acquire a clear image, it needs a 600-line camera. CCD sensitivity is a sensitivity level to the ambient light, that is, the limit light is needed for normal imaging. The illumination is smaller which means it needs less light, and the camera is more sensitive. Imaging on moving objects and recording information from the periphery of cylindrical objects will lead to blurring of the images. In order to resolve this problem, Asundi et al.[5] proposed TDI-CCD (Time Delay Integration Charge Coupled Device) technology for motion detection and rotating cylinder imaging. Experiments showed[6] that the application of TDICCD technology can capture images of cylindrical objects, and quickly identify the edge of the detected objects and defects.
Fig. 3 Fig. 2
Optics principle schematic of cone LED light source
Experimental equipment for automatic surface defect detection of
cylindrical objects
Fig.3 shows the experimental equipment for automatic surface
defect detection of cylindrical objects. C. Image Enhancement Image enhancement technology is to maximize the contrast to give optimum output for edge processing. Image enhancement technology can be classified into two categories [7], i.e. the methods based on image domain and the methods based on transform domain. Methods based on image domain are to process image data directly, e.g. the single pixel and the smaller sub-image. The algorithms consist of linear contrast stretch, Unsharp Masking (UM), adaptive enhancement algorithm, histogram equalization algorithm and a variety of optimized algorithms. Methods based on transform domain are to process images inside the transform domain, that is, the image data are converted to other domain through some sort of transformation, and then converted back to image domain after processed. Some of the most common transformation methods are Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform, wavelet transform and so on. Wavelet-based adaptive enhancement, Retinex and Curvelet transform-based enhancement method belong to this category too. D. Image Segmentation Image segmentation is the technology that segments the image into several areas with different features, and extracts the target areas. The features can be gray-level, color, texture, et al., and the target areas can be a single area or multi-areas correspondingly [8]. The study of image segmentation is emphasis and difficulty in the image engineering and machine vision technology. In recent years, there are many algorithms being proposed and applied to practice, such as the Markov random field [9], expert system [10], Gribbs random field[11], Bayesian theory [12], wavelet modulus maximum [13], hidden Markov model [14], fractal [15], et al. The methods of image segmentation can be classified into three categories based on the image features[7]. The first is the threshold method, image segmentation is achieved by determining a certain threshold in teams of the distribution characteristics of the images gray-level. The second is the boundary segmentation method, it is achieved by means of checking out the boundary of a closed area, namely segmenting the area along the closed edge lines. The third is the regional extraction method which is based on different characteristics between the specific region and the background region. E. Image Recognition Image recognition is to classify images after processing and determine their categories. It is able to select target features, measure certain parameters, extract these features and ultimately classify them in terms of measurement results. Therefore, image recognition is to ease images classification, and analyze the whole image by finding out features (e.g.
shape and texture) in the areas after segmenting, i.e. feature
extraction. There are two main factors that affect the outcome of image recognition, that is, the selection of the target features and the classification algorithms. The accuracy of target features selection is crucial to recognition result and the computation of classification algorithm. As Gabor wavelet transform can well describe the problems aroused from biological visual neurons, adjust its spatial and frequency sampling characteristics accordingly in terms of specific visual needs, obtain target features of interest, many researchers have paid extensive attention to Gabor filter and its application in image classification and machine vision [16]. BLOB algorithm [17] is aimed at finding out the scope of the gray-level mutations in an area, and determining its size, shape, area and exact location. The algorithm which is fast and exhibits good real-time can be employed in many occasions that the image quality is very high and can be well segmented with threshold. III.
APPLICATIONS OF MACHINE VISION IN SURFACE DEFECT
DETECTION OF PLASTIC PRODUCTS
During the process of plastic products, there are various
defects on the surface, such as short shot, shrink marks, welding line, streaks, spots, gas bubbles, voids, blistering, spray marks, warp, scratches, cracks and so on. The products defects often arise as a result from materials, process, mold, product design and equipments, et al. A common task in molding industries is the visual inspection of plastic products attempting to detect any defects present. Traditionally this task has been undertaken by process workers, but this poses certain problems, since humans are relatively costly, and the repetitive nature of the task can cause problems with fatigue and loss of concentration. Recent years have seen advances in machine vision systems, whereby the human inspector is (at least partially) replaced and/or supported by the automatic detection. Prabuwono et al.[18] developed an intelligent visual inspection system(IVIS) for bottling machine, focusing on the development of image processing framework for defect
Fig. 4
Intelligent visual inspection system for the surface defects of plastic
bottles
detection. Fig.4 shows the intelligent visual inspection system
for the surface defects of plastic bottles. The experiment results showed that the system was accurate enough to detect moving objects at 106 rpm and the accuracy of the image acquisition was 94.264%. We mainly focus on the automatic detection of surface defect for injection products. Fig.5 shows the system structure schematic for surface defects automatic detection for injection products. The system is composed of three parts. They are described respectively as follows. (1) Conveyor belt device. It is available to convey the injection products uniformly and facilitate CCD camera capture the images dynamically. (2) Image acquisition and processing section. It can transfer the collected images to the industrial computer using CCD camera and image acquisition card. The industrial computer will process the images and send out judgment results. (3) PLC control device. The rejects products will be separated from the quality ones according to the judgment results. The system works by conveying the injection products through conveyor belt using linear mode transmission. According to the principle of machine vision, the CCD camera dynamically captures images synchronized with production line, and transmits the image data to the industrial computer for processing using image acquisition card timely. The industrial computer analyzes and compares the processing results to make appropriate judgment. Judgment results are then transmitted to the PLC control unit. The latter locates and marks on the reject products on the basis of results. Then the slide driven by the motor rotates, and separates the quality products and the reject ones into different containers, achieving detection and sorting the products automatically. IV.
production level, and has wide application prospect. At
present, there are some difficulties in the promotion and application of automatic detection. Meanwhile, the application of the automatic detection technology of surface defects on plastic products in the practical production is not very popular, and the research on injection products is expressly rare. In addition, because of varied types, forms and features of the defects, it causes much more difficulties in the research. It is urgently needed of experts to work together to improve the development and application level of automatic detection technology of surface defects on injection plastic products. [1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7] [8] [9]
[10]
[11]
CONCLUSIONS
The research and application of automatic detection
technology of surface defects on plastic products will greatly liberate the human workforce, improve the automated
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15] [16]
[17]
[18] Fig. 5
System structure schematic for surface defect automatic detection of
injection products
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