Automatic Optical Inspection for steel golf club

With the growing popularity of golf sport all over the world, the production in the relevant products is increasing year by year. To be more competitive, automation of production in manufacturing plays an important role. This paper has developed a system to follow the trend of this production automation. It intends to use the AOI (Automated Optical Inspection) technology to develop a system which can automatically detect defects on the clubs made with steel. Due to the strong reflective property of the steel, subtle flaws, as well as its slender and cone shape body, it is very difficult to take good quality image for automatic inspection. In this paper, we proposed a novel illumination approach to make acquisition of good image become possible. Experimental results show that it can achieve 88% of detection rate, which is close to that of visual inspection.