Design and development of a machine vision system using artificial neural network-based algorithm for automated coal characterization

Coal is heterogeneous in nature,and thus the characterization of coal is essential before its use for a specific purpose.Thus,the current study aims to develop a machine vision system for automated coal characterizations.The model was calibrated using 80 image samples that are captured for different coal samples in different angles.All the images were captured in RGB color space and converted into five other color spaces(HSI,CMYK,Lab,xyz,Gray)for feature extraction.The intensity component image of HSI color space was further transformed into four frequency components(discrete cosine transform,discrete wavelet transform,discrete Fourier transform,and Gabor filter)for the texture features extraction.A total of 280 image features was extracted and optimized using a step-wise linear regression-based algorithm for model development.The datasets of the optimized features were used as an input for the model,and their respective coal characteristics(analyzed in the laboratory)were used as outputs of the model.The R-squared values were found to be 0.89,0.92,0.92,and 0.84,respectively,for fixed carbon,ash content,volatile matter,and moisture content.The performance of the proposed artificial neural network model was also compared with the performances of performances of Gaussian process regression,support vector regression,and radial basis neural network models.The study demonstrates the potential of the machine vision system in automated coal characterization.

A Machine Vision System for Ball Grid Array Package Inspection

An optical inspection method of the Ball Grid Array package(BGA) was proposed by using a machine vision system. The developed machine vision system could get main critical factors for BGA quality evaluation, such as the height of solder ball, diameter, pitch and coplanarity. The experiment has proved that this system is available for BGA failure detection.

Machine vision system for visual defect inspection of TFT-LCD

To improve the identification for visual defect of TFF-LCD, a new machine vision system is proposed, which is superior to human eye inspection. The system respectively employs a CCD camera to capture the image of TFT-LCD panel and an image processing system to identify potential visual defects. Image pre-processing, such as average filtering and geometric correction, was performed on the captured image, and then a candidate area of defect was segmented from the background. Feature information extracted from the area of interest entered a fuzzy rule-based classifier that simulated the defect inspection of TFT-LCD undertaken by experienced technicians. Experiment results show that the machine vision system can obtain fast, objective and accurate inspection compared with subjective and inaccurate human eye inspection.

Developing a Machine Vision System Equipped with UV Light to Predict Fish Freshness Based on Fish-Surface Color

This study assessed the feasibility of developing a machine vision system equipped with ultraviolet (UV) light, using changes in fish-surface color to predict aerobic plate count (APC, a standard freshness indicator) during storage. The APC values were tested and images of the fish surface were taken when fish were stored at room temperature. Then, images’ color-space conversion among RGB, HSV, and L*a*b* color spaces was carried out and analyzed. The results revealed that a* and b* values from the UV-light image decreased linearly during storage. A further regression analysis of these two parameters with APC value demonstrated a good exponential relationship between the a* value and the APC value (R2 = 0.97), followed by the b* (R2 = 0.85). Therefore, our results suggest that the change in color of the fish surface under UV light can be used to assess fish freshness during storage.

A MACHINE VISION SYSTEM FOR INSPECTING WOOD SURFACE DEFECTS BY USING NEURAL NETWORK

With the development of wood industry, the processing of wood products becomemore significant. This paper discusses the developmen of machine vision system used to inspect andclassny the various types of defects of wood suxface. The surface defeds means the variations ofcolour and textUre. The machine vision system is to dated undesirable 'defecs' that can appear onthe surface of rough wood lwnber. A neural network was used within the Blackboard framework fora labeling verification step of the high-level recognition module of vision system. The system hasbere successfully tested on a number of boards from several different species.

Automatic Monitoring System for 3-D Deformation of Crustal Fault Based on Laser and Machine Vision

An automatic monitoring method of the 3-D deformation is presented for crustal fault based on laser and machine vision. The laser source and screen are independently set up in the headwall and footwall, the collimated laser beam creates a circular spot on the screen, meanwhile, the industrial camera captures the tiny deformation of the crustal fault by monitoring the change of the spot position. This method significantly reduces the cost of equipment and labor, provides daily sampling to ensure high continuity of data. A prototype of the automatic monitoring system is developed, and a repeatability test indicates that the error of spot jitter can be minimized by consecutive samples. Meanwhile, the environmental correction model is determined to ensure that environmental changes do not disturb the system. Furthermore, the automatic monitoring system has been applied at the deformation monitoring station(KJX02) of China Beishan underground research laboratory, where continuous deformation monitoring is underway.

Next-generation machine vision systems incorporating two-dimensional materials: Progress and perspectives

Machine vision systems(MVSs)are an important component of intelligent systems,such as autonomous vehicles and robots.However,with the continuous increase in data and new application scenarios,new requirements are put forward for the next generation of MVS.There is an urgent need to find new material systems to complement the existing semiconductor technology based on thin-film materials,and new architectures must be explored to improve efficiency.Because of their unique physical properties,two-dimensional(2D)materials have received extensive attention for use in MVSs,especially in biomimetic ones:the human visual system,which can process complex visual information with low power consumption,provides a model for next-generation MVSs.This review paper summarizes the progress and challenges of applying 2D material photodetectors in sense-memory-computational integration and biomimetic image sensors for machine vision.

Development of an automatic monitoring system for rice light-trap pests based on machine vision

Monitring pest populations in paddy fields is important to effectively implement integrated pest management.Light traps are widely used to monitor field pests all over the world.Most conventional light traps still involve manual identification of target pests from lots of trapped insects,which is time-consuming,labor-intensive and error-prone,especially in pest peak periods.In this paper,we developed an automatic monitoring system for rice light-trap pests based on machine vision.This system is composed of an itelligent light trap,a computer or mobile phone client platform and a cloud server.The light trap firstly traps,kills and disperses insects,then collects images of trapped insects and sends each image to the cloud server.Five target pests in images are automatically identifed and counted by pest identification models loaded in the server.To avoid light-trap insects piling up,a vibration plate and a moving rotation conveyor belt are adopted to disperse these trapped insects.There was a close correlation(r=0.92)between our automatic and manual identification methods based on the daily pest number of one-year images from one light trap.Field experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and accuracy of our automatic light trap monitoring system.

Research on intelligent search-and-secure technology in accelerator hazardous areas based on machine vision

Prompt radiation emitted during accelerator operation poses a significant health risk,necessitating a thorough search and securing of hazardous areas prior to initiation.Currently,manual sweep methods are employed.However,the limitations of manual sweeps have become increasingly evident with the implementation of large-scale accelerators.By leveraging advancements in machine vision technology,the automatic identification of stranded personnel in controlled areas through camera imagery presents a viable solution for efficient search and security.Given the criticality of personal safety for stranded individuals,search and security processes must be sufficiently reliable.To ensure comprehensive coverage,180°camera groups were strategically positioned on both sides of the accelerator tunnel to eliminate blind spots within the monitoring range.The YOLOV8 network model was modified to enable the detection of small targets,such as hands and feet,as well as larger targets formed by individuals near the cameras.Furthermore,the system incorporates a pedestrian recognition model that detects human body parts,and an information fusion strategy is used to integrate the detected head,hands,and feet with the identified pedestrians as a cohesive unit.This strategy enhanced the capability of the model to identify pedestrians obstructed by equipment,resulting in a notable improvement in the recall rate.Specifically,recall rates of 0.915 and 0.82were obtained for Datasets 1 and 2,respectively.Although there was a slight decrease in accuracy,it aligned with the intended purpose of the search-and-secure software design.Experimental tests conducted within an accelerator tunnel demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach in achieving reliable recognition outcomes.

Apple fruit size estimation using a 3D machine vision system

Estimation of fruit size in tree fruit crops is essential for selective robotic harvesting and crop-load estimation.Machine vision systems for fruit detection and localization have been studied widely for robotic harvesting and crop-load estimation.However,only a few studies have been carried out to estimate fruit size in orchards using machine vision systems.This study was carried out to develop a machine vision system consisting of a color CCD camera and a time-of-flight(TOF)light-based 3D camera for estimating apple size in tree canopies.As a measure of fruit size,the major axis(longest axis)was estimated based on(i)the 3D coordinates of pixels on corresponding apple surfaces,and(ii)the 2D size of individual pixels within apple surfaces.In the 3D coordinates-based method,the distance between pairs of pixels within apple regions were calculated using 3D coordinates,and the maximum distance between all pixel pairs within an apple region was estimated to be the major axis.The accuracy of estimating the major axis using 3D coordinates was 69.1%.In the pixel-size-based method,the physical sizes of pixels were estimated using a calibration model developed based on pixel coordinates and the distance to pixels from the camera.The major axis length was then estimated by summing the size of individual pixels along the major axis of the fruit.The accuracy of size estimation increased to 84.8%when the pixel size-based method was used.The results showed the potential for estimating fruit size in outdoor environments using a 3D machine vision system.

Dynamic Vision-Based Machinery Fault Diagnosis With Cross-Modality Feature Alignment

Intelligent machinery fault diagnosis methods have been popularly and successfully developed in the past decades,and the vibration acceleration data collected by contact accelerometers have been widely investigated.In many industrial scenarios,contactless sensors are more preferred.The event camera is an emerging bio-inspired technology for vision sensing,which asynchronously records per-pixel brightness change polarity with high temporal resolution and low latency.It offers a promising tool for contactless machine vibration sensing and fault diagnosis.However,the dynamic vision-based methods suffer from variations of practical factors such as camera position,machine operating condition,etc.Furthermore,as a new sensing technology,the labeled dynamic vision data are limited,which generally cannot cover a wide range of machine fault modes.Aiming at these challenges,a novel dynamic vision-based machinery fault diagnosis method is proposed in this paper.It is motivated to explore the abundant vibration acceleration data for enhancing the dynamic vision-based model performance.A crossmodality feature alignment method is thus proposed with deep adversarial neural networks to achieve fault diagnosis knowledge transfer.An event erasing method is further proposed for improving model robustness against variations.The proposed method can effectively identify unseen fault mode with dynamic vision data.Experiments on two rotating machine monitoring datasets are carried out for validations,and the results suggest the proposed method is promising for generalized contactless machinery fault diagnosis.

Performance Assessment on Corrosion Resistance of Refractory Materials Based on High-temperature Machine Vision Technology

Refractory materials,as the crucial foundational materials in high-temperature industrial processes such as metallurgy and construction,are inevitably subjected to corrosion and penetration from high-temperature media during their service.Traditionally,observing the in-situ degradation process of refractory materials in complex high-temperature environments has presented challenges.Post-corrosion analysis are commonly employed to assess the slag resistance of refractory materials and understand the corrosion mechanisms.However,these methods often lack information on the process under the conditions of thermal-chemical-mechanical coupling,leading to potential biases in the analysis results.In this work,we developed a non-contact high-temperature machine vision technology by the integrating Digital Image Correlation(DIC)with a high-temperature visualization system to explore the corrosion behavior of Al2O3-SiO2 refractories against molten glass and Al2O3-MgO dry ramming refractories against molten slag at different temperatures.This technology enables realtime monitoring of the 2D or 3D overall strain and average strain curves of the refractory materials and provides continuous feedback on the progressive corrosion of the materials under the coupling conditions of thermal,chemical,and mechanical factors.Therefore,it is an innovative approach for evaluating the service behavior and performance of refractory materials,and is expected to promote the digitization and intelligence of the refractory industry,contributing to the optimization and upgrading of product performance.

A CCD based machine vision system for real-time text detection

Text detection and recognition is a hot topic in computer vision,which is considered to be the further development of the traditional optical character recognition(OCR)technology.With the rapid development of machine vision system and the wide application of deep learning algorithms,text recognition has achieved excellent performance.In contrast,detecting text block from complex natural scenes is still a challenging task.At present,many advanced natural scene text detection algorithms have been proposed,but most of them run slow due to the complexity of the detection pipeline and can not be applied to industrial scenes.In this paper,we proposed a CCD based machine vision system for realtime text detection in invoice images.In this system,we applied optimizations from several aspects including the optical system,the hardware architecture,and the deep learning algorithm to improve the speed performance of the machine vision system.The experimental data confirms that the optimization methods can significantly improve the running speed of the machine vision system and make it meeting the real-time text detection requirements in industrial scenarios.

Research on automatic inspection system for defects on precise optical surface based on machine vision

In manufacture of precise optical products, it is important to inspect and classify the potential defects existing on the products’ surfaces after precise machining in order to obtain high quality in both functionality and aesthetics. The existing methods for detecting and classifying defects all are low accuracy or efficiency or high cost in inspection process. In this paper, a new inspection system based on machine vision has been introduced, which uses automatic focusing and image mosaic technologies to rapidly acquire distinct surface image, and employs Case-Based Reasoning(CBR)method in defects classification. A modificatory fuzzy similarity algorithm in CBR has been adopted for more quick and robust need of pattern recognition in practice inspection. Experiments show that the system can inspect surface diameter of 500mm in half an hour with resolving power of 0.8μm diameter according to digs or 0.5μm transverse width according to scratches. The proposed inspection principles and methods not only have meet manufacturing requirements of precise optical products, but also have great potential applications in other fields of precise surface inspection.

基于Machine Vision技术的电梯超载自动化检测方法研究

为提高电梯的使用安全性,避免过量的空间占有率导致的故障问题,提出了基于Machine Vision技术的电梯超载自动检测方法。通过电梯内部的摄像头得到影像数据,然后对图像进行切片与去噪处理,以此得到方差图,并提高算法对边缘图像的识别能力,明确前景面积的占有率,通过此方法得到整个电梯空间的占有率数据,从而实现自动化判断电梯是否超载的功能。试验结果表明:此方法可精确计算出电梯的空间占有率,并能够实现自动化监控的目的,具有良好的适用性。

Development of an automatic weld surface appearance inspection system using machine vision

In this paper, an automatic inspection system for weld surface appearance using machine vision has been developed to recognize weld surface defects such as porosities, cracks, etc. It can replace conventional manual visual inspection method, which is tedious, time-consuming, subjective, experience-depended, and sometimes biased. The system consists of a CCD camera, a self-designed annular light source, a sensor controller, a frame grabbing card, a computer and so on. After acquiring weld surface appearance images using CCD, the images are preprocessed using median filtering and a series of image enhancement algorithms. Then a dynamic threshold and morphology algorithms are applied to segment defect object. Finally, defect features information is obtained by eight neighborhoods boundary chain code algorithm. Experimental results show that the developed system is capable of inspecting most surface defects such as porosities, cracks with high reliability and accuracy.

High-precision automatic measurement of two-dimensional geometric features based on machine vision

To realize high-precision automatic measurement of two-dimensional geometric features on parts, a cooperative measurement system based on machine vision is constructed. Its hardware structure, functional composition and working principle are introduced. The mapping relationship between the feature image coordinates and the measuring space coordinates is established. The method of measuring path planning of small field of view （FOV） images is proposed. With the cooperation of the panoramic image of the object to be measured, the small FOV images with high object plane resolution are acquired automatically. Then, the auxiliary measuring characteristics are constructed and the parameters of the features to be measured are automatically extracted. Experimental results show that the absolute value of relative error is less than 0. 03% when applying the cooperative measurement system to gauge the hole distance of 100 mm nominal size. When the object plane resolving power of the small FOV images is 16 times that of the large FOV image, the measurement accuracy of small FOV images is improved by 14 times compared with the large FOV image. It is suitable for high-precision automatic measurement of two-dimensional complex geometric features distributed on large scale parts.

Accurate Measurement Method for Tube's Endpoints Based on Machine Vision

Tubes are used widely in aerospace vehicles, and their accurate assembly can directly affect the assembling reliability and the quality of products. It is important to measure the processed tube＇s endpoints and then fix any geometric errors correspondingly. However, the traditional tube inspection method is time-consuming and complex operations. Therefore, a new measurement method for a tube＇s endpoints based on machine vision is proposed. First, reflected light on tube＇s surface can be removed by using photometric linearization. Then, based on the optimization model for the tube＇s endpoint measurements and the principle of stereo matching, the global coordinates and the relative distance of the tube＇s endpoint are obtained. To confirm the feasibility, ll tubes are processed to remove the reflected light and then the endpoint＇s positions of tubes are measured. The experiment results show that the measurement repeatability accuracy is 0.167 mm, and the absolute accuracy is 0.328 ram. The measurement takes less than 1 min. The proposed method based on machine vision can measure the tube＇s endpoints without any surface treatment or any tools and can realize on line measurement.

Selection for high quality pepper seeds by machine vision and classifiers

This research aimed to improve selection of pepper seeds for separating high-quality seeds from low-quality seeds. Past research has shown that seed vigor is significantly related to the seed color and size, thus several physical features were identified as candidate predictors of high seed quality. Image recognition software was used to automate recognition of seed feature quality using 400 kernels of pepper cultivar 101. In addition, binary logistic regression and a neural network were applied to determine models with high predictive value of seed germination. Single-kernel germination tests were conducted to validate the predictive value of the identified features. The best predictors of seed vigor were determined by the highest correlation observed between the physical features and the subsequent fresh weight of seedlings that germinated from the 400 seeds. Correlation analysis showed that fresh weight was significantly positively correlated with eight physical features： three color features （R, a＊, brightness）, width, length, projected area, and single-kernel density, and weight. In contrast, fresh weight significantly negatively correlated with the feature of hue. In analyses of two of the highest correlating single features,＇ germination percentage increased from 59.3 to 71.8% when a＊〉3, and selection rate peaked at 57.8%. Germination percentage increased from 59.3 to 79.4%, and the selection rate reached 76.8%, when single-kernel weight 〉0.0064 g. The most effective model was based on a multilayer perceptron （MLP） neural network, consisting of 15 physical traits as variables, and a stability calculated as 99.4%. Germination percentage in a calibration set of seeds was 79.1% and the selection rate was 90.0%. These results indicated that the model was effective in predicting seed germination based on physical features and could be used as a guide for quality control in seed selection. Automated systems based on machine vision and model classifiers can contribute to reducing the costs and labor required in the selection of pepper seeds.

Machine Vision Based Measurement of Dynamic Contact Angles in Microchannel Flows

When characterizing flows in miniaturized channels, the determination of the dynamic contact angle is important. By measuring the dynamic contact angle, the flow properties of the flowing liquid and the effect of material properties on the flow can be characterized. A machine vision based system to measure the contact angle of front or rear menisci of a moving liquid plug is described in this article. In this research, transparent flow channels fabricated on thermoplastic polymer and sealed with an adhesive tape are used. The transparency of the channels enables image based monitoring and measurement of flow variables, including the dynamic contact angle. It is shown that the dynamic angle can be measured from a liquid flow in a channel using the image based measurement system. An image processing algorithm has been developed in a MATLAB environment. Images are taken using a CCD camera and the channels are illuminated using a custom made ring light. Two fitting methods, a circle and two parabolas, are experimented and the results are compared in the measurement of the dynamic contact angles.