A vision-based character inspection system for tire mold
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to design an automatic inspection system for the characters on tire molds, which involves a vision-based inspection method for the characters on tire molds.
Design/methodology/approach
An automatic inspection equipment is designed according to the features of the tire mold. To implement the inspection task, the corresponding image processing methods are designed, including image preprocessing, image mosaic, image locating and character inspection. Image preprocessing mainly contains fitting the contours of the acquired tire mold images and those of the computer aided design (CAD) as the arcs of two circles and polar transformation of the acquired images and the CAD. Then, the authors propose a novel framework to locate the acquired images into the corresponding mosaicked tire mold image. Finally, a character inspection scheme is proposed by combining an support-vector-machine-based character recognition method and a string matching approach. At the stages of image locating and character inspection, image mosaic is simultaneously used to label the defects in the mosaicked tire mold image, which is based on histograms-of-gradients features.
Findings
The experimental results indicate that the designed automatic inspection system can inspect the characters on the tire mold with a high accuracy at a reasonable time consumption.
Practical implications
The designed automatic inspection system can detect the carving faults for the characters on the tire molds, which are the cases that the characters are wrongly added, deleted or modified on the tire mold.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first automatic vision-based inspection system for the characters on tire molds. An inspection equipment is designed and many novel image processing methods are proposed to implement the inspection task. The designed system can be widely applied in the industry.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61001179), Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 2015A030312008) and Guangdong Science and Technology Plan (Grant Nos. 2015B010104006, 2015B010124001, 2015B010102014 and 2015B090903017).
Citation
Cai, N., Chen, Y., Liu, G., Cen, G., Wang, H. and Chen, X. (2017), "A vision-based character inspection system for tire mold", Assembly Automation, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 230-237. https://doi.org/10.1108/AA-07-2016-066
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited