Photometric stereo on carbon fiber surfaces ∗

The production of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) is currently changing from a highly manual and expensive to an automated process. However for automated production of CFRP parts new sensor systems for quality control are required. In this article we present a photometric stereo inspection system that is able to automatically evaluate critical quality criteria of carbon fiber fabrics. Based on the sensor output we propose a specific segmentation method, tailored towards the typical properties of woven carbon fiber fabrics that partitions the fabric into single segments for feature calculation and classification. Finally we show that the proposed system is able to detect a multitude of defects in a real-time system.