Visualization and detection of small defects on painted or varnished surfaces

Surface defect inspection is a very common task that is performed in the industry as a final quality step of manufacturing processes. Despite that a lot of care is taken in order to avoid that these small defects appear, they often are visible just after the painting or varnishing is applied. A new technique shown on this paper allows us a successful inspection on these type of surfaces. A fast computer vision algorithm is also presented. This algorithm is specially useful for small defects or low resolution defects detection providing a high robustness and performance when critical processing time is required.