With the aid of the newly developed system, visibly barely perceptible surface defects on vehicle components, i.e. bumps, dents, and ripples, are automatically recognized, classified, and marked. From the beginning this system helps to avoid the propagation of surface defects during the painting process.
© MEV
Image processing has become an important part of industrial production. For a number of years, test systems have been taken into account directly during the planning of a production line, instead of being installed afterwards. Surface inspection in particular has become one of the most important quality assurance measures. Especially the quality assurance and optimization sector in the automotive industry has grown considerably.
Various projects are presented below:
To ensure a sound quality of the painted car body surface an optimal preparation of the raw car body is required. To reduce treatment of the car after painting it is necessary to recognize and treat the defects before finishing the fabrication of the raw car body.
In the project ABIS (Automatic Body Inspection System), which is promoted by the Bavarian Research Foundation, a system is being developed which is able to detect, classify, and mark the different types of defects on a raw car body. Propagation of these defects in the painting process can thereby be prevented.
For this purpose the system has been developed with these features:
The part of the ITWM within this project is the detailed analysis of the detected patches with possible defects. Due to the high resolution of the images (irregularities from 40 µm are to be detected) they are strongly disturbed. Additionally, since the inspection should be done on-line, only little time for the processing of each single image is available. The following image processing tools are used for this analysis process.
During the production process of free surface parts, it is impossible to avoid surface defects. In order to reduce refinishing in the painting processes and to guarantee a constant quality level, it is necessary to detect and correct surface defects as soon as possible.
The objective of the joint project OPAQ, funded by the federal ministry for education and research (BMBF), is the detection of surface defects occurring during the process of sheet metal forming. A 3D inspection system for surface control was developed which was integrated directly into the press section, so that the quality at the process boundaries have been made transparent.
Currently, techniques for contact-free optical surface measurement and inspection of 3D-objects become more and more important.
Especially in the area of quality and process control the two methods have established because they are both fast and reliable. While methods for 2D-surface control are being used for defect detection, 3D-surface measurement is mainly being used for verifying geometrical measures. Although there exist synergies that could improve the quality of both techniques they are still being applied independently.
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM