Development of Computer-vision-based Pipe Inspection System

Recently, there has been an increasing demand for computer-vision-based inspection and/or measurement system as a part of factory automation equipment. In general, it is almost impossible to check the fault of all parts, coming from part-feeding system, with only manual inspection because of time limitation. Therefore, most of manual inspection is applied to specific samples, not all coming parts, and manual inspection neither guarantee consistent measuring accuracy nor decrease working time. Thus, in order to improve the measuring speed and accuracy of the inspection, a computer-aided measuring and analysis method is highly needed. In this paper, a computer-vision-based pipe inspection system is proposed, where the front and side-view profiles of three different kinds of pipes, coming from a forming line, are acquired by computer vision. And the edge detection is processed by using Laplace operator. To reduce the vision processing time, modified Hough transform is used with clustering method for straight line detection. And the center points and diameters of inner and outer circle are found to determine eccentricity of the parts. Also, an inspection system has been built so that the data and images of faulted parts are stored as files and transferred to the server.