Automatic optical inspection system design for golf ball

With the growing popularity of golf sport all over the world, the quantities of relevant products are increasing year by year. To create innovation and improvement in quality while reducing production cost, automation of manufacturing become a necessary and important issue. This paper reflect the trend of this production automation. It uses the AOI (Automated Optical Inspection) technology to develop a system which can automatically detect defects on the golf ball. The current manual quality-inspection is not only error-prone but also very manpower demanding. Taking into consideration the competition of this industry in the near future, the development of related AOI equipment must be conducted as soon as possible. Due to the strong reflective property of the ball surface, as well as its surface dimples and subtle flaws, it is very difficult to take good quality image for automatic inspection. Based on the surface properties and shape of the ball, lighting has been properly design for image-taking environment and structure. Area-scan cameras have been used to acquire images with good contrast between defects and background to assure the achievement of the goal of automatic defect detection on the golf ball. The result obtained is that more than 97% of the NG balls have be detected, and system maintains less than 10% false alarm rate. The balls which are determined by the system to be NG will be inspected by human eye again. Therefore, the manpower spent in the inspection has been reduced by 90%.