1. Project description

This work is one of the projects I was responsible for during my work in 2019 at Beijing, China. The goal of this project is to develop an appearance defect detection system which can be deployed in the production line to automatically detect and count the defects of electronic components.

As the less flexible and non-intelligent, traditional machine vision systems are mainly designed to inspect the dimension or location of the products. For appearance inspection, such as crack, damage, cosmetics, etc., it heavily relies on the experience of the opeartors with microscope. Thus, there are always operators crowded around the production line. However, the operators are not always reliable, especially when they are tired or appearance irregular states. And the salary of the operators is also a big cost for the company. Therefore, company is looking for a more reliable and intelligent solution to replace the operators.

Samples of the electronic components

Challenges:

  • The defects are various in shape, size, and position.
  • The defects are very small and difficult to detect.
  • The defects are very rare.

2. Responsibilities

  • Developed an intelligent appearance defect detection system based on ViDi Suite from Cognex.
  • Deployed the system in the production line and cooperated with other engineering processes, like robot arm, to realize the automatic detection.

3. Contributions

  • Designed the scheme of appearance inspection according to the requirements of the customer.
  • Collected and labeled the real samples of the electronic components from the production line.
  • Designed the intelligent appearance defect detection system with the tools of ViDi Suite.
  • Trained and deployed the system.
  • Write the technical documents and user manuals.

Tools: C#, ViDi Suite, VisionPro

4. Results

  • Setup:
    • Industrial camera1: Basler 5MP
    • Industrial camera2: Basler 1.3MP
    • Lighting: LED ring light
    • 4 shots for camera1 and 1 shot for camera2 (5 detections in total)

  • The deployed appearance defect detection system

  • The detection results