Object recognition and inspection in difficult industrial environments

The manufacturing environment is characterized by rapid change, originating new challenges and problems to the production and operation manager in the industry. In response to the need for fast and flexible manufacturing, increasing attention is being given to integration of computing technologies with the manufacturing systems leading to the development of fast and flexible manufacturing systems aided with high performance vision capabilities. This paper presents an inspection and recognition system for manufacturing applications in difficult industrial environments. In such difficult environments, where objects to be recognized can be dirty and illumination conditions cannot be sufficiently controlled, the required accuracy and rigidity of the system are critical features. The purpose of the real-time system is to inspect and recognize air-conditioning objects for avoiding deficiency in the manufactured process and erroneous identifications due to a large variety of size and kinds of objects. The proposed system is composed by five USB cameras (640x480 pixel resolution, 30 Hz frame rates and 8mm lenses) plug into a conventional computer (Pentium IV 3 GHz). The edged images are features which are relatively robust against illumination changes, so the system can work well in difficult environments mentioned. Experimental results on inspection and recognition of a large variety of air-conditioning objects are provided to show the performance of the system in a difficult environment.