Search results

Inspection is an activity that controls the outgoing product quality and involves search, detection and measurement or diagnosis. Traditionally, inspection tasks have been allocated to humans. Attempts to automate industrial inspection in order to eliminate errors and alleviate monotony have faced difficulties due to technological limitations and/or prohibitive implementation costs. An occasional compromise is partial automation (hybrid inspection). Reviews published research in manual, hybrid and automated inspection to understand the current research status.

The automatic visual inspection of glassware is a challenging and potentially rewarding field of study. It is possible to detect a wide range of glassware defects and profiles automatically. This article reviews these possibilities and justifies the view that automated visual inspection systems will be increasingly used in glassware inspection tasks.

Automated visual inspection is vital in the production of manufactured products acceptable to world market standards. The volatile nature of the consumer markets is placing increased emphasis on manufacturers to produce cheaper products of higher quality. With increasingly more manufacturers implementing advanced manufacturing principles to perform agile manufacturing, the need for cost‐effective, automated quality control has been highlighted. This paper proposes a cost‐effective, automated, visual inspection system capable of performing in‐process verification in the flexible manufacturing environment.

This paper describes the development of a novel automated vision system used to detect the visual defects on painted slates.

The vision system that has been developed consists of two major components covering the opto‐mechanical and algorithmical aspects of the system. The first component addresses issues including the mechanical implementation and interfacing the inspection system with the development of a fast image processing procedure able to identify visual defects present on the slate surface.

The inspection system was developed on 400 slates to determine the threshold settings that give the best trade‐off between no false positive triggers and correct defect identification. The developed system was tested on more than 300 fresh slates and the success rate for correct identification of acceptable and defective slates was 99.32 per cent for defect free slates based on 148 samples and 96.91 per cent for defective slates based on 162 samples.

The experimental data indicates that automating the inspection of painted slates can be achieved and installation in a factory is a realistic target. Testing the devised inspection system in a factory‐type environment was an important part of the development process as this enabled us to develop the mechanical system and the image processing algorithm able to perform slate inspection in an industrial environment. The overall performance of the system indicates that the proposed solution can be considered as a replacement for the existing manual inspection system.

The development of a real‐time automated system for inspecting painted slates proved to be a difficult task since the slate surface is dark coloured, glossy, has depth profile non‐uniformities and is being transported at high speeds on a conveyor. In order to address these issues, the system described in this paper proposed a number of novel solutions including the illumination set‐up and the development of multi‐component image‐processing inspection algorithm.

Electronics manufacturing throughout the world now uses an increasing percentage of Surface Mount Technology (SMT). The compact and light‐weight surface‐mounted components offer a number of advantages to manufacturers. Unfortunately, however, these same beneficial characteristics make the quality of the product difficult to guarantee. As miniaturisation continues, the inspection problem becomes worse, and so advanced methods of inspection are required. Automatic inspection systems already exist, although an effective, inexpensive and reliable system has yet to be found. Recent work carried out within the Coherent and Electro‐Optics Research Group at Liverpool Polytechnic has looked at the feasibility of applying some of its established inspection methods to the problem of solder joint inspection. Extensive development must still take place; however, the methods employed have shown promise. The system uses structured light techniques to add height information to an image of the solder joint under inspection. In this way a 3‐D image of the joint may be built up, digitised and processed in a computer at high speed in order to determine its quality.

Quality control and part inspection add no monetary value to a product, yet are essential processes for manufacturers who want to maintain product quality. Mass‐produced custom parts require processes that are able to perform high frequency of inspection, whilst providing rapid response to unanticipated changes in parameters such as throughputs, dimensions and tolerances. Frequent inspection of these parts significantly impacts inspection times involved. A method of reducing the impact of high‐frequency inspection on production rates is needed. This paper addresses these issues.

This paper involves the research, design, construction, assembly and implementation of an automated apparatus, used for the visual inspection of moving custom parts. Inspection occurred at user‐defined regions of interest (ROIs). Mechatronic Engineering principles are used to integrate sensor articulation, image acquisition and image‐processing systems. The apparatus is tested in a computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM) cell for quantifying results.

Specified production rates are maintained whilst performing high frequencies of inspection, without stoppage of parts along the production line.

The limitations of these results lie in the fact that they are suited only to the speed of the CIM cell. Higher inspection rates may be achieved, and changes in the design may be required in order to make the apparatus more suitable to industrial applications.

The paper shows that it is possible to maintain high standards of quality control without significantly affecting production rates.

Current research does not focus on maintaining production rates whilst inspecting custom parts. The use of ROI inspection for moving custom parts is a relatively new concept.

There are many methods and solutions to improve any process, and stay within the established control limits. Statistically analyzed data, received from inspection sensors and other devices, are one of them. Automated inspection sensors and systems are effective tools for controlling variation and obtaining process related knowledge. Automated inspection methods, discussed in this paper, represent an important, nevertheless not the only methods, that lead to process improvement, the ultimate goal of total quality management and control (TQM/TQC). Inspection, as part of the feedback control loop of the overall TQM/TQC process, involves the continual satisfaction of customer requirements at lowest cost by harnessing the efforts of everybody in the company. The key question in any inspection system is as follows: Are the measured values within tolerance, or not, and if they are outside the tolerance limits, why did we produce those parts in the first place?

This article demonstrates the importance of intelligent measuring systems, particularly computer vision systems for automatic visual inspection.

The problem of automating visual inspection is considered along with the developments that are likely to occur.

Seeks to determine whether hybrid inspection performance is superior to manual performance in a generic manufacturing setup. Explains the design of an experiment to achieve this comparison. Results include the fact that the hybrid method took substantially less time and caused fewer inspection errors. Notes that cost factors would need to be carefully considered before selection of a preferred method but that ultimately the hybrid method should be the logical choice.