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ABSTRACT
An architecture for surface analysis of continuous cast aluminum strip is described. The data volume
to be processed has forced up the development of a high-parallel architecture for high-speeed image
processing. An specially suitable lighting system has been developed for defetc enhancing in metallic
surfaces. An special effort has been put in the design of the defect detection algorithm to reach two main
objectives: robustness and low processing time. These goals have been achieved combining a local analysis
togheter with data interpretation based on syntactical analysis what has allowed to avoid morfological
analysis.
Defect classification is accomplished by means of ruled-based systems along with data-based
classifiers. The use of clustering techniques is discussed to perform partitions in R by SOM, divergency
methods to reduce the feature vector applied to the data-based classifiers. The combination of techniques
inside a hybrid system leads to near 100% classification sucess.
Keywords. Automated visual inspection. Image Processing. Feature selection. Neural networks. Hybrid systems.
1.INTRODUCTION
Surface inspection is usually a bottle-neck in many production processes. There is a great number of
manufacturing processes where inspection for surface finishing or surface defects is attempted: steel strip, hot steel slabs,
plastic plates, painted surfaces, wooden surfaces, profiles The most difficult task of inspection is that of inspecting
for visual appearance. The visual inspection in most manufacturing processes depends mainly on human inspectors
whose performance is generally inadequate and variable. The human visual system is adapted to perform in a world of
variety and change; the visual inspection process, on the other hand, requires observing the same type of image
repeatedly to detect anomalies.. The accuracy of human visual inspection declines with dull, endlessly routine jobs.
Slow, expensive, erratic inspection is the result. Automated visual inspection is obviously the alternative to the human
inspector.
Along these past years several systems have been developed for visual defect detection in textile products, wood,
steel, aluminum,.., but defect classification remains under research. Defects in these products present several troubles
like the presence of many defect types, different appearances for the same defect that demand recognition systems able
to on-line learning.
Aluminum strip obtention from molten metal requires inspection of surface appearance as well as control over
some other features like surface temperature, profile thickness,... for quality assessment.
Its aim is to detect when a surface defect appears. It is composed by a lighting system, CCD cameras, and image
processing hardware. From an early classification of Former' for visual inspection systems, these can be classified by
the kind of images they use: binary images, gray level images, color images or range images. Specialized bibliography
on surface inspection points out that, generally, gray ivel images are used for this purpose. Most of the applications for
cork, steel, wood, paper inspection use image substraction techniques or local threshold algorithms for defect detection2.
For defect detection in cast aluminum, experience from Macaire and Piironen2 has been applied.
B&W CCD cameras has been adopted as the most appropiate for the application, mainly by two reasons: the
maximum strip speed does not overcome 2 ni/rn, which permits acquisition times of 50mseg. and also because
neighbourhood processing is demanded, since aluminum surface contains a great amount of texture that does not allows
threshold-based processing. Specifications for the vision system include:
Minimum defect size: 1 mm2
With a resolution of 2 pixel/mm using 752*528 pixel cameras, eigth cameras are disposed by each side of the
strip. Processing time for each image rounds 2 seconds.
Once got, images from aluminum are processed to find defects. A local analysis is carried out to localize defects,
since it is not possible a global scope due to the presence of texture. Due to the high roughness of the aluminum surface,
clear points appear mingled with darker ones; some defects do not produce a significant variation in the absolute gray
level values, but produce an alteration in the spatial distribution of gray levels.
Previous to image processing, an image is acquired setting the diaphragm to the maximum opening, avoiding
saturations, keeping the maximum meassuring range with the best quantification of the analog signal. Then, images are
displaced n gray levels to avoid overflows during the processing stage.
Similarity-based algorithms as well as texture analysis6 have been developed for defect detection. According to
conclussions over real time processing7, the use of simple statistical parameters leads to high performance in real-time
artificial vision applications. The defect detection algorithm is executed considering that the gray level distribution over
the aluminum surface under uniform light fits a Gauss density function, which average depends on the illumination level
and the nature of the inspected material, keeping almost constant the variance. A pixel is considered no faulty when it
observes:
m(x,y) is the grey level average (3 x 3) from correct pixel and X1, X2 the grey values around the average and p(x,y) is
the average from image to analyze. The processing steps are minimum (average in the neighbourhood environment and
local comparison with patterns) and allow to define defects with appearance "clear" or "dark". Subsequently, it is passed
to detection of presence /absence of defects with a simple image histogram result.
The absence of defects permits light pattern updating, with the aim of removing potential defects produced by
the waste in the lamps, presence of dust, or variation in light levels due to sunlight.
The presence of defects will originate an object labelling stage into clear and dark objects. In the case that the
number of objects were excessive (case of the sticking defect which envolves many images) the local thresholds will
be increased (Xl, X2) carrying the formation of a new light pattern. The experience has demonstrated that the
identification of defects does not require an excessive number of objects, as the presentations of these maintain space
characteristics well differentiated. Therefore, the local thresholds is a dynamic feature and its value will depend on the
aluminum appearance.
Since the final goat is to classify defects into M classes (5 or 8) starting from the labelled set of samples, the
method starts studying the features obtained by the image processing hardware; second, it is necessary to select those
best features containing the most information. For a better interpretation ot the pattern's structure, features are processed
by menas of cluster analysis to determine if sub-classes are present for any of the known defect types. When designing
the classifiers, two different working lines have been followed: the first one, classifiers based on an hybrid system, is
completely implemented; second one, trying to combine knowledge methods, factorial analysis and bayesian classifiers
is under research.
We have used syntactic methods for defect representation, therefore direct methods are employed to describe
defects with primitives. In a first development, the all possible number of object attributes were extracted, characteristics
of edges and regions with techniques of scalar transformation, attending to the Pavlidis classification8. The knowledge
of defect's privileged directions involving traverse or longitudinal bands as well as speckles, forced up the development
of a continuous algorithm based on defect mass and perform a transformation from object information into terminal
elements that are common to all grammars. Terminal elements has been used to associate object attributes with spatial
features. Theses primitives act as sources for parametric and non parametric classifiers.
For each defect an information tree is obtained following the previous steps; each node of this tree contains the
terminal elements and the information of lower level, for each of the images in witch the defect was detected.
(Figure 4).
At this moment, we have a terminal element collection ready to use as input vector for classifiers based on
concatenation rules, composed by the primitives sequence, but we also need an input vector for data-based classifiers.
For this reason, the primitives information requires a transformation from terminal element sequences to pattern vector
with n dimension.
This method offers multiple advantages. First, if there is not uncertainity in defect representation through
primitives, the information volume is smallest and its conclusion is an smallest n dimension pattern space. For instance,
a sticking defect may occurs for up to 1 .5 meters without interruption, which implies up to 10 Mbytes information from
video source. Using the developed artificial vision algorithms this information becomes into several tens of bytes,
allowing small processing time (less than 300 msec/image).
Second, the quality of pattner vector depends of quality of primitives, therefore if terminal elements data contains
information about defect structure, then our descriptors will have higher cualification than classical descriptors.
Third, the pattern vector is gotten with all the images that contain defect, and it is independent on the numers of
images.
Fourth, features are quite homogeneous if they are selected using global criteria, i. e., the sum of areas of every
of the primitives.
Fifth, vector dimension is smallest because each descriptor has cualitive information and not cuantitative one.
All theses reasons permit to use togheter serveral classifiers in real time, because we only need a vector with
18-dimension in our application.
The following step is to optimize the feature vector to help an optimum design of the classifiers.
The conversion of the information concerning terminal elements into the feature vector includes two different
kinds of features: general data, refering to the defect size and structure data that refers to the different topologies, in
percentage, that compose the whole defect.
With genemi data' the length and width of the whole defect is specified. Rotation radius is employed to avoid
errors produced in the segmentation process. Only 'Y' coordinate -casting direction- is used, since traversal position
of defects is not important. Also inertia moments - respect to the vertical and horizontal lines passing through the mass
center of the defect- are taken into account. These five data are calculated separately for the clear and dark portions of
the defect, and form the first 10 input data for the neural network.
'Structure data' means information about how the defect is composed by terminal elements. Final data includes
the whole area of every of the eigth different terminal elements confained in the defect.
A carefull study of the feature vector has been performed by means of multivariate analysis. Traditionally, there
are two ways to reduce the feature vector: to remove those features that make less contribution to explain variability
40/SPIEVo!. 2665
The global and cuantitative point of view of the problem is a first approximation, since the discrimination level
of almost every method depends on the own classes definition which not always fits with the homogeneous associations
in the input space; there are sub-classes with different positions inside W' and with non-normal density distributions.
The global study of the feature vector shows three possible ways to follow: go on with the classifier design using the
same vector, a vector that is a proyection over the main components or use a selection following a feature ranking.
The complexity of the exposed method leads more to an artistic design for the classifier than a technnical one.
The second step is to know the structure of the information, that is, which natural associations are discovered in Jt; for
this purpose auto orgarnzative maps has been used, training several maps following the three ways mentioned above.
Along this experience it could be seen how, without introducing any kind of information about defect type, some clear
belonging areas to different defect sub-classes were shown. From these regions in the input space and from the
knowledge about the defects12, fatures are selected in a way that discrimination degree is optimized for every region.
Self-organizing maps represents an image from the feature space and its proyection is performed in an optimum
way, in the sense that the topology of the input space is kept, when possible, over the net surface (near processing
elements correspond to similar inputs x to the net). Also, the map reflects the density functions of x : regions of the
feature space whose representatives x more often appears are mapped over a greater number of processing elements 13,
14, 15
Considering practical advices when developing with SOM'6 and after several initializations, the method showed
great convergency; three maps were obtained: excited with the feature vector, main components projection and reduced
vector. The best approximation was found with the map excited with the feature vector, which was afterwards tuned
by means of LVQ1.
At this point is when feature selection can be made, since a global reduction is not feasible until a region is
defined, that, togheter with the knowledge about the classification problem pennits a better selection and higher
discrimination level. Now is when human aportation is necessary, since it is no possible to estimate the knowledge from
an infinite number of samples. Once the problem has been associated with the human knowledge, it is time to design
the optimum classifier for this zone in In the following paragraph thissubject is described.
To achieve better success rate in the system of self-organized maps with fine tunning LVQ1, a transformation
is performed that consists of maximization of the distance among classes of the border groups. This happends when the
output corresponds to excitation of neurons in border positions.
Once the zone is detected, it is observed which are the most discriminant features. Afterwards a rn-dimension sub-
space is constructed (( rn n) and the estimation of intraclass and interciass covariance matrices are obtained. To
maximize the separation of the clusters, a transformation matrix is used with the eigenvalues of the matrix:
After, a bayesian classifier is constructed. Preliminary results show an improvement of 77% over the work
performed by the net. This leads to a global improvement up to 98,74 %.
The techniques employed were selected as a result of searching for classification subsystems with
supplementary features. Primitives have conditioned the use of free-context grammars for each defect type,
so a rule-based production system has been implemented and in addtion we tried to increase performance
including concepts about fuzzy clasifiers'8. Several nets have been used to perform at this stat . Also
statistical decision is used20. As a result of this research the first classification step is performed by:
1. Rule-based systems: use of a free-context grammar for each defect type, along with supervising system
and fuzzy classifiers.
2. MLPs with backpropagation learning algorithm, useful by their high capacity of generalization.
3. LVQ Net with nearest neighbor based classifier.
4. ART Net for the determination of new defect types.
5. Statistical decision
At the top, acting as a supervising system, a neural system (MLP wit backpropagation learning
algorithm) selects the most accurated classification. In a previosly reported work21 every subsystem is showed
in detail. Tables I, II show result for both five and eight defects classifications.
Since process control depends on information from the visual inspection system, it is necessary to
completly assure classification sucess; for this purpose an hybrid configuration has been adopted.
ab.crist. 89 89 68 94 94
Table I
long. bands 84 94 68 68 94
abcrisL 89 89 68 94 94
Table H
A defect classification system for surface defect classification in cast aluminum, based on several artificial
intelligence techniques has been described. Artificial vision algorithms has been implemented for process description
and for feature extraction. The presence of defects in the aluminum strip is on-line achieved. When no defect appears,
it forces the renovation of the light pattern over the strip, while the presence of defect starts out the classification
process.
Syntactic methods are used for defect representation. The information primitives are transformed into a feature
vector. It has been discussed about feature selection from a global point of view to a particilar focus when knowledge
about defect topology is avaliable in advance. Self-organized maps are used for data exploration. Homogeneous
associations are used to construct belonging functions and also bayesian classifiers are employed to get sepparation in
border neurons. Classification process is performed by an hybid system which conclusion is tranmitted to an expert
system that decides the control actions to be taken in the casting process and also elaborates the quality report for every
produced coil.
Image processing algorithms has been developed using Matrox's IMAGE 1280 board and finally implemented
in a real-time image processing hardware, IMACAD 240 from SECAD. Man-machine interface is supported whitin a
Windows 3.X application under C++. For neural nets development NEURALWOKS II was used and after they were
attached to the rest of the software. Discriminant analysis was performed using TOOLDIAG22 and MATLAB software
packages.
Classification success goes from 95.7% for eight defects to 99.7% for five defects classification. The use of
Dynamic Libraries that keep the code belonging to classifiers, along with a programmed tool for on-line defect
supervision allows a fine tunning of classifiers and also an easy update.
5. REFERENCES.
1. Newman,T.S., Jam, A.K., A Survey of Automated Visual Inspection, Computer Vision and Image
Undesstanding, Vol. 61, March, pp 231-262,1995
2. Batchelor,B.G., Braggins,D.W. Commercial vision systems, Computer Vision: Theory and Industrial
Applications, pp 405-452, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1992
3. Piironen, T., Silven, 0., Pietikäinen, M., Laitinen, T. Automated Visual Inspection of Rolled Metal Surface,
Machine Vision and Applications,Vol. 3, pp 247-254, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1990
4. Macaire, L., Postaire, J.G. Flaw detection on galvanized metallic strips in real time by adaptive thresholding,
Computer Vision for Industry, Vol. 189, pp 14-25,SPIE 1993
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