Applications to Industrial Quality Inspection

Abstract

Industrial quality inspection is an important application domain of three-dimensional computer vision methods. Traditional vision-based industrial quality inspection systems primarily rely on two-dimensional detection and pose estimation algorithms e.g. relying on the detection of point and line features, the extraction of blob features from binarised images, or two-dimensional grey value correlation techniques. More advanced vision-based quality inspection systems employ three-dimensional methods in order to detect production faults more reliably and robustly. In this section we regard applications in the automobile industry of the methods for three-dimensional pose estimation of rigid and articulated objects described in previous chapters. A typical area of interest is checking for completeness of a set of small parts attached to a large workpiece, such as plugs, cables, screws, and covers mounted on a car engine. A different task is the inspection of the position and orientation of parts, e.g. for checking if they are correctly mounted but also for grasping and transporting them with an industrial robot. For each scenario we compare our evaluation results to results reported in the literature for systems performing similar inspection tasks. Furthermore, we describe applications of the developed integrated approaches to the three-dimensional reconstruction of rough metallic surfaces of automotive parts.