Neural Classifiers for Automated Visual Inspection

This paper discusses the application of a back-propagation multi-layer perceptron and a learning vector quantization network to the classification of defects in valve stem seals for car engines. Both networks were trained with vectors containing descriptive attributes of known flaws. These attribute vectors (‘signatures’) were extracted from images of the seals captured by an industrial vision system. The paper describes the hardware and techniques used and the results obtained.