Open Access Research Article

New Structured Illumination Technique for the Inspection of High-Reflective Surfaces: Application for the Detection of Structural Defects without any Calibration Procedures

Yannick Caulier1*, Klaus Spinnler1, Salah Bourennane2 and Thomas Wittenberg1

Author Affiliations

1 Fraunhofer-Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen IIS, Am Wolfsmantel 33, 91058 Erlangen, Germany

2 GSM, Institut Fresnel, CNRS-UMR 6133, École Centrale Marseille, Université Aix-Marseille III, D.U. de Saint-Jérôme, Marseille Cedex 20, France

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EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing 2007, 2008:237459 doi:10.1155/2008/237459


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jivp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2008/1/237459


Received:31 January 2007
Accepted:29 November 2007
Published:29 November 2007

© 2008 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We present a novel solution for automatic surface inspection of metallic tubes by applying a structured illumination. The strength of the proposed approach is that both structural and textural surface defects can be visually enhanced, detected, and well separated from acceptable surfaces. We propose a machine vision approach and we demonstrate that this technique is applicable in an industrial setting. We show that recording artefacts drastically increases the complexity of the inspection task. The algorithm implemented in the industrial application and which permits the segmentation and classification of surface defects is briefly described. The suggested method uses "perturbations from the stripe illumination" to detect, segment, and classify any defects. We emphasize the robustness of the algorithm against recording artefacts. Furthermore, this method is applied in 24 h/7 day real-time industrial surface inspection system.

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