Real-Time Automatic Visual Inspection of High-Speed Plane Products by Means of Parallelism

Abstract

Parallel processing can effectively satisfy the real-time constraints required by on-line machine vision applications. This paper describes a real-time automatic visual inspection (AVI) system for high-speed plane products, which is based on a reconfigurable and scalable coarse-grain distributed memory MIMD architecture, and a unique application programming interface. The code of application algorithms are source level machine independent. As our prototype is organized as a test bed, new algorithms and even new dedicated hardware processing elements can quickly be evaluated on it. The system can easily be tailored for various automatic visual surface inspection applications. An example for inspecting whether separate small mosaics (textures) in a scene are in normal shapes is described. The algorithm combines the connected component labeling, the moment calculation and the pattern recognition. This key task for most applications is well suited for the “divide and conquer” parallel paradigm. The real-time performance has been achieved on a TMS320C40 array.