Automated Visual Inspection
Humans are good at searching for the unusual and locating faults in manufactured products, but they rapidly tire when large numbers of items have to be scrutinized. Automated visual inspection seeks to achieve 100% untiring inspection and control of quality. This chapter describes the processes and principles needed to achieve this end, the main limitation being the impossibility of covering the full variety of products in a single chapter.
• the variety of products to be inspected.
• the main categories of inspection.
• how deviations relative to a standard template can be measured.
• the methodology for scrutinizing circular objects.
• the problems of inspecting products exhibiting high levels of variability.
This chapter seeks to give a broad view of inspection and is counterbalanced by the following chapter which covers a particular application area in more depth. This approach is appropriate because case studies provide one of the best ways to extend the work to the wide variety of products.