纺织品检验中视觉平台的构建

针对目前纺织品外观检验主要采用人工检验的各种问题,研究了一种基于机器视觉技术的纺织品检验方法,介绍了机器视觉检验的工作原理,叙述了图像采集平台和图像处理的设计思路。通过基于机器视觉的生丝黑板检验系统的实际案例分析,表明机器视觉在纺织品检验中具有广泛的应用前景。     

机器视觉在印刷缺陷在线检测中的应用与研究

为了提高印刷缺陷检测准确性与效率,满足缺陷检测的实时性,提出了机器视觉技术应用于印刷缺陷在线检测并研究检测过程中的相关问题.设计印刷缺陷在线检测的方案及以数字信号处理器DSP为核心的视觉在线检测系统的硬件结构组成.研究图像预处理、图像匹配与缺陷检测的算法并加以改进使其满足缺陷检测的实时性.开发印刷品缺陷视觉检测软件,对缺陷检测流程进行仿真,验证检测方案与图像处理算法的可行性.     

Early detection of independent motion from active control of normalimage flow patterns

An important initial step in interpreting a dynamic scene is to detect moving objects in the environment. This paper presents a novel solution to the problem of early motion detection by a moving observer. The solution requires the observer to be active in the acquisition of images thereby controlling the optical flow pattern due to egomotion. A theoretical analysis is done based on geometric considerations to establish conditions that are necessary and sufficient to guarantee motion detection at a point. The detection problem is posed in terms of locally computable image quantities (the normal image flow) which this makes it implementable in real time. The performance of the technique can be improved by imposing any applicable constraint; this is demonstrated for the detection of the motions of "compact" objects satisfying a size bound. The goal is to design a flexible and efficient early motion detection strategy that can be tailored to the needs of a particular navigation system.     

Parametric active membrane for segmentation of multiple objects in an image

We propose a topology adaptive active membrane that can segment images of multiple objects present in a scene. The parametric active membrane evolves in image space and splits into multiple membranes. The shape of the membrane can be constrained according to the shape of the objects present in a scene. We have shown that this active membrane model is also suitable for segmenting images of touching objects. The proposed segmentation technique unifies the membrane evolution and membrane splitting process. The methodology is tested for a number of real images from biomedical and machine vision domains that demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.     

Machine learning approach for automated visual inspection of machine components

Visual inspection on the surface of components is a main application of machine vision. Visual inspection finds its application in identifying defects such as scratches, cracks bubbles and measurement of cutting tool wear and welding quality. Machine learning approach to machine vision helps in automating the design process of machine vision systems. This approach involves image acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. Study shows a library of features, and classifiers are available to classify the data. However, only the best combination of them can yield the highest classification accuracy. In this study, images with different known conditions were acquired, preprocessed, and histogram features were extracted. The classification accuracies of C4.5 classifier algorithm and Naïve Bayes algorithm were compared, and results are reported. The study shows that C4.5 algorithm performs better.     

Electric contacts inspection using machine vision

Machine vision is an excellent tool for inspecting a variety of industrial items such as textiles, printed circuit boards, electric components, labels, integrated circuits (IC), machine tools and fruits. In this paper, we propose machine vision-based inspection system for electric contact (EC), which are popularly used in switches, breakers and relays, and are important components in the electrical industry. The proposed system consists of three sub-systems, which inspect the top, side, and bottom surfaces of electric contact for different types of defects respectively. The system acquires the digital image of three views and classifies the surface defects including cracks, breaks, and scratches. For each view, this study develops different image pre-processing and feature extraction methods to enhance and detect the surface defects. The proposed system was implemented and verified using 229 samples collected from the EC production lines. Experimental results show the proposed system is effective and efficient in identifying EC defects.     

Removal of specular reflections from image sequences using feature correspondences

The presence of specular highlights can hide underlying features of a scene within an image and can be problematic in many application scenarios. In particular, this poses a significant challenge for applications where image stitching is used to create a single static image of a scene from inspection footage of pipes, gas tubes, train tracks and concrete structures. Furthermore, they can hide small defects in the images causing them to be missed during inspection. We present a method which exploits additional information in neighbouring frames from video footage to reduce specularity from each frame. The technique first automatically determines frames which contain overlapping regions before the relationship that exists between them is exploited in order to suppress the effects of specular reflections. This results in an image that is free from specular highlights provided there is at least one frame present in the sequence where a given pixel is present in a diffuse form. The method is shown to work well on greyscale as well as colour images and effectively reduces specularity and significantly improves the quality of the stitched image, even in the presence of noise. While applied to the challenge of reducing specularity in inspection videos, the method improves upon the state-of-the-art in specularity removal, and its applications are wide-ranging as a general purpose pre-processing tool.     

智能制造装备视觉检测控制方法综述

为满足智能制造装备产业对机器视觉技术的巨大需求,本文结合装备技术特点和特殊应用环境,提出了通用的机器视觉检测控制技术体系,弥补了当前研究的不足.本文首先对该技术体系的成像系统、自动图像获取、图像预处理、标定与分割、识别检测、视觉伺服与优化控制等关键核心技术,进行了总结和阐述.然后提出了视觉检测控制系统设计的一般原理,并结合3种典型装备,对其具体应用进行详细说明.最后根据智能制造装备不断增长的高可靠性、智能化、高速高精度作业等需求,探讨了视觉检测控制技术所面临的新问题和新挑战.     

A new hardware module for automated visual inspection based on a cellular automaton architecture

This paper presents the design and VLSI implementation of a new automated visual inspection system based on a cellular automaton architecture, suitable for circular object inspection. Cellular Automata (CA) transform the area of the object of interest into a number of evolution steps in the CA space. The proposed technique does not require the extraction of image features, such as boundary length and total area, which are computationally expensive in other methods. The die size dimensions of the chip, for a 16×16 pixel image, are 3.73 mm×3.09 mm=11.52 mm² and its maximum frequency of operation is 25 MHz. Experimental results using computer-generated images, as well as real images obtained and processed through a commercial vision system, showing the suitability of the proposed hardware module for detecting circular objects, are also presented. Targeted applications include inspection tasks (accept/reject operations) of circular objects, such as tablets in the pharmaceutical industry, and detection of uncoated areas, foreign objects and level of bake in the confectionery and food industry.     

Impact of object extraction methods on classification performance in surface inspection systems

In surface inspection applications, the main goal is to detect all areas which might contain defects or unacceptable imperfections, and to classify either every single ‘suspicious’ region or the investigated part as a whole. After an image is acquired by the machine vision hardware, all pixels that deviate from a pre-defined ‘ideal’ master image are set to a non-zero value, depending on the magnitude of deviation. This procedure leads to so-called “contrast images”, in which accumulations of bright pixels may appear, representing potentially defective areas. In this paper, various methods are presented for grouping these bright pixels together into meaningful objects, ranging from classical image processing techniques to machine-learning-based clustering approaches. One important issue here is to find reasonable groupings even for non-connected and widespread objects. In general, these objects correspond either to real faults or to pseudo-errors that do not affect the surface quality at all. The impact of different extraction methods on the accuracy of image classifiers will be studied. The classifiers are trained with feature vectors calculated for the extracted objects found in images labeled by the user and showing surfaces of production items. In our investigation artificially created contrast images will be considered as well as real ones recorded on-line at a CD imprint production and at an egg inspection system.     

The illumination-invariant matching of deterministic localstructure in color images

The availability of multiple spectral measurements at each pixel in an image provides important additional information for recognition. Spectral information is of particular importance for applications where spatial information is limited. Such applications include the recognition of small objects or the recognition of small features on partially occluded objects. We introduce a feature matrix representation for deterministic local structure in color images. Although feature matrices are useful for recognition, this representation depends on the spectral properties of the scene illumination. Using a linear model for surface spectral reflectance with the same number of parameters as the number of color bands, we show that changes in the spectral content of the illumination correspond to linear transformations of the feature matrices, and that image plane rotations correspond to circular shifts of the matrices. From these relationships, we derive an algorithm for the recognition of local surface structure which is invariant to these scene transformations. We demonstrate the algorithm with a series of experiments on images of real objects     

FPGA based disparity map computation with vergence control

Depth estimation in a scene using image pairs acquired by a stereo camera setup, is one of the important tasks of stereo vision systems. The disparity between the stereo images allows for 3D information acquisition which is indispensable in many machine vision applications. Practical stereo vision systems involve wide ranges of disparity levels. Considering that disparity map extraction of an image is a computationally demanding task, practical real-time FPGA based algorithms require increased device utilization resource usage, depending on the disparity levels operational range, which leads to significant power consumption. In this paper a new hardware-efficient real-time disparity map computation module is developed. The module constantly estimates the precisely required range of disparity levels upon a given stereo image set, maintaining this range as low as possible by verging the stereo setup cameras axes. This enables a parallel-pipelined design, for the overall module, realized on a single FPGA device of the Altera Stratix IV family. Accurate disparity maps are computed at a rate of more than 320 frames per second, for a stereo image pair of 640 × 480 pixels spatial resolution with a disparity range of 80 pixels. The presented technique provides very good processing speed at the expense of accuracy, with very good scalability in terms of disparity levels. The proposed method enables a suitable module delivering high performance in real-time stereo vision applications, where space and power are significant concerns.     

A vision system for robotic inspection and manipulation

A model-based approach has been proposed to make object recognition computationally tractable. In this approach, models associated with objects expected to appear in the scene are recorded in the system's knowledge base. The system extracts various features from the input images using robust, low-level, general-purpose operators. Finally, matching is performed between the image-derived features and the scene domain models to recognize objects. Factors affecting the successful design and implementation of model-based vision systems include the ability to derive suitable object models, the nature of image features extracted by the operators, a computationally effective matching approach, knowledge representation schemes, and effective control mechanisms for guiding the systems's overall operation. The vision system they describe uses gray-scale images, which can successfully handle complex scenes with multiple object types     

A Direct Interpretation of Dynamic Images with Camera and Object Motions for Vision Guided Robot Control

A general scheme to represent the relation between dynamic images and camera and/or object motions is proposed for applications to visual control of robots. We consider the case where a moving camera observes moving objects in a static scene. The camera obtains images of the objects moving within the scene. Then, the possible combinations of the camera and the objects' poses and the obtained images are not arbitrary but constrained to each other. Here we represent this constraint as a lower dimensional hypersurface in the product space of the whole combination of their motion control parameters and image data. The visual control is interpreted as to find a path on this surface leading to their poses where a given goal image will be obtained. In this paper, we propose a visual control method to utilize tangential properties of this surface. First, we represent images with a composition of a small number of eigen images by using K-L (Karhunen-Loève) expansion. Then, we consider to reconstruct the eigen space (the eigen image space) to achieve efficient and straightforward controls. Such reconstruction of the space results in the constraint surface being mostly flat within the eigen space. By this method, visual control of robots in a complex configuration is achieved without image processing to extract and correspond image features in dynamic images. The method also does not need camera or hand-eye calibrations. Experimental results of visual servoing with the proposed method show the feasibility and applicability of our newly proposed approach to a simultaneous control of camera self-motion and object motions.     

Three-dimensional data acquisition by trinocular vision

For recognition of three-dimensional (3D) shapes and measurement of 3D positions of objects it is important for a vision system to be able to measure the 3D data of dense points in the environment. One approach is to measure the distance on the basis of the triangulation principle from the disparity of two images. However, this binocular vision method has difficulty in finding a correspondence of features between two images. This correspondence problem can be solved geometrically by adding another camera, i.e. by trinocular vision. This paper presents the principles and implementation details of trinocular vision. On the basis of the proposed method, we carried out several experiments, from which we found that many correct correspondences could be established, even for images of a complex scene, by only the geometrical constraint of trinocular vision. However, when there are dense points in the image, multiple candidate points are found and a unique correspondence cannot be established. Two approaches to solve this problem are discussed in this paper.     

Stereo disparity optimization with depth change constraint based on a continuous video

Three-dimensional reconstruction based on stereo vision technology is an important research direction in the field of computer vision, and has a wide range of applications in industrial measurement, medical image reconstruction, cultural relic preservation, robot navigation, virtual reality and other fields. However, the three-dimensional reconstruction of moving objects usually has poor accuracy, low efficiency and poor visualization effect due to the image noise, motion blur, complex and time-consuming calculation etc. In this article, a disparity optimization method based on depth change constraint is proposed, which utilizes the correlation of the adjacent frames in the continuous video sequence to eliminate mismatches and correct the wrong disparity values by introducing a depth change constraint threshold. The experiments on the video images which are taken by a binocular stereo vision system demonstrate that our method of removing incorrect matches bears satisfactory results and it can greatly improve the effect of the three-dimensional reconstruction of the moving objects.     

Surface area-based focus criterion for multi-focus image fusion

Nowadays image processing and machine vision fields have become important research topics due to numerous applications in almost every field of science. Performance in these fields is critically dependent to the quality of input images. In most of the imaging devices, optical lenses are used to capture images from a particular scene. But due to the limited depth of field of optical lenses, objects in different distances from focal point will be captured with different sharpness and details. Thus, important details of the scene might be lost in some regions. Multi-focus image fusion is an effective technique to cope with this problem. The main challenge in multi-focus fusion is the selection of an appropriate focus measure. In this paper, we propose a novel focus measure based on the surface area of regions surrounded by intersection points of input source images. The potential of this measure to distinguish focused regions from the blurred ones is proved. In our fusion algorithm, intersection points of input images are calculated and then input images are segmented using these intersection points. After that, the surface area of each segment is considered as a measure to determine focused regions. Using this measure we obtain an initial selection map of fusion which is then refined by morphological modifications. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, we compare its results with several competing methods. The results show the effectiveness of our proposed method.     

Using distance transform to solve real-time machine vision inspection problems

This paper describes novel solutions to two challenging real-time inspection tasks in machine vision. The first is fast surface approximation for volume and surface area measurements of irregularly shaped objects; the second is fast intensity gradient correction for surface inspection and evaluation of spherical objects. Both solutions apply a distance transform (DT) based on the distance of each image pixel from the object boundary. We describe both real-time machine vision inspection tasks and discuss their complexity. We show that the new solutions result in significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency—despite the relative simplicity of the DT approach.     

A real-time fuzzy hardware structure for disparity map computation

Stereo images acquired by a stereo camera setup provide depth estimation of a scene. Numerous machine vision applications deal with retrieval of 3D information. Disparity map recovery from a stereo image pair involves computationally complex algorithms. Previous methods of disparity map computation are mainly restricted to software-based techniques on general-purpose architectures, presenting relatively high execution time. In this paper, a new hardware-implemented real-time disparity map computation module is realized. This enables a hardware-based fuzzy inference system parallel-pipelined design, for the overall module, implemented on a single FPGA device with a typical operating frequency of 138 MHz. This provides accurate disparity map computation at a rate of nearly 440 frames per second, given a stereo image pair with a disparity range of 80 pixels and 640 × 480 pixels spatial resolution. The proposed method allows a fast disparity map computational module to be built, enabling a suitable module for real-time stereo vision applications.