Automatic Optical Inspection System for Wire Color Sequence Detection

Given the huge demand for wire in today’s society, the quality of the wire is especially required. To control the quality of the produced wire, the industry has a great desire for automated optical inspection technology. This technology is a high-speed and highly accurate optical image inspection system that uses mechanical sensing equipment to replace the human eye as the inspection method and simulates manual operation by means of a robotic arm. In this paper, a high-performance algorithm for the automated optical inspection of wire color sequence is proposed. This paper focuses on the design of a high-speed wire color sequence detection that can automatically adapt to different kinds of wires and recognition situations, such as a single wire with only one color, and one or two wires covered with aluminum foil. To be further able to successfully inspect even if the wire is short in the screen and the two wires are close to each other, we calculate the horizontal gradient of the wires by edge detection and morphological calculation and identify the types and color sequences of the wires in the screen by a series of discriminative mechanisms. Experimental results show that this method can achieve good accuracy while maintaining a good computation speed.