Design and Development of Intelligent Defect Detection on Metallic Coated Surfaces

Abstract

Automation using intelligent vision-based techniques is one of the hot topics in the current field of research. The main applications of automation spread over various commercial and non-commercial domains such as clinical analysis, industrial automation, cognitive control of smart devices, etc. In the industrial domain, automation has applications in almost all areas like manufacturing, quality control, packing, marketing and fault detection. Quality control is an important stage where an inspection mechanism is utilized for screening a component s quality in different manufacturing or processing stages. Several delicate devices, such as medical implants, as well as the components of heavy machines, are made up of different modules, and the quality maintenance of each of those submodules is critical for the overall performance. For quality control and screening, one of the viable approaches for inspection is by verifying the defects by visual analysis and by detecting the variation of colour, texture, and finish. However, manual inspection has many disadvantages, such as slower process, inter-person variability and high cost. newlineIn automating such a screening process, image processing and vision-based approaches have now become popular as it could handle most of the visual analysis tasks with minimal cost, fewer errors, and in a faster manner. One of the main challenges in these vision-based quality control and defect detection is the need for separate algorithms for different scenarios. The proposed thesis aims at such an automated defect detection method for screening metal surfaces. Several manufacturing processes use reinforcement of base material using strong compounds to improve overall strength and corrosion resistance. Hence, the quality of such coating is very important. The research in this thesis primarily focusses on the detection and quantification of defects from Titanium Nitride (TiN) coated metal surfaces. TiN coating is a well known protective and hardening process for many industrial devices