Car Inspection System

Abstract

A car's check-up and inspection are considered as important processes that should be performed periodically, in car rental, maintenance, and insurance companies. These processes expend the companies’ efforts and take a long time in inspecting the car's body as part of its admission to maintenance or its return to the car rental company. Currently, a car body's inspection process is done manually; therefore, this needs more time and effort to be completed. In the same time, it negatively affects the accuracy of the process because a human eye can hardly detect the scratches and dents on a car's body. From this point, our role comes in building an automated Car Inspection System (CIS). The system aims to automate exploring the car body defects such as scratches and dents, decrease the use of papers and loss of data, and make the inspection process more efficient. The car has to be placed in a certain parking area and a correct position using the sensors; then, CIS will start its process. There are two situations: car reception and car admission. Using professional cameras and storing them in CIS database in car reception, the system will take pictures of the car from its different sides. While the car is in admission, the system will take new pictures of the car to compare them with the pictures stored during the first time of admission for inspection using image processing technique. If there are any differences between the pictures, the system will highlight them directly. The database will be updated with the new pictures of the car and, finally, a report with the inspection's details will be sent via email to the customer and system administrator. CIS is implemented by using ASP.NET in C#, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and Canon camera SDK (System Development Toolkit). Practically, CIS facilitates the inspection process by reducing time and effort; moreover, the car's inspection accuracy has increased. The availability of this product in companies contributes to make a worthy impression about the company, and this reflects the efficiency of its work through performing an automated inspection process.