Defect Detection Techniques for Airbag Production Sewing Stages

Airbags are subjected to strict quality control in order to ensure passengers safety. The quality of fabric and sewing thread influences the final product and therefore, sewing defects must be early and accurately detected, in order to remove the item from production. Airbag seams assembly can take various forms, using linear and circle primitives, with threads of different colors and length densities, creating lockstitch or double threads chainstitch. The paper presents a framework for the automatic detection of defects occurring during the airbag sewing stage. Types of defects as skipped stitch, missed stitch, or superimposed seam for lockstitch and two threads chainstitch are detected and marked. Using image processing methods, the proposed framework follows the seams path and determines if a color pattern of the considered stitches is valid.