High-Speed Processing For Automatic Visual Inspection And Measurement.

This paper mainly deals with methods for high-speed automatic visual inspection and measurement. First, the algorithmic aspects of pattern recognition are briefly reviewed. Second, the different elements of a visual inspection and measurement system are discussed. Third, special attention is paid to image processing operations for visual inspection and measurement which can be executed in real time or pseudo real time. They include run length encoding, the calculation of projections, windowing, edge detection, texture analysis and the calculation of spatial moments. A hardware implementation of each of those operations exists or is being developed at our laboratories. Finally, we emphasize the importance of artificial intelligence techniques for visual inspection tasks where complexity instead of speed is the limiting factor.