Vision-based surface defect inspection of metal balls

Abstract

A machine vision system developed for inspecting metal ball surface defects is presented. The proposed system is capable of inspecting the entire surface of a ball by capturing multiple gray-scale images with two progressive CCD cameras as the ball rolls on an inclined rail. The specular reflectance of the metal surface is lessened by installing a shade around the ball. Defects are detected by simply comparing each captured image with its corresponding reference image. The system built for the experiment could sort two chrome balls per second with a spatial resolution better than 0.1 mm.