System for Image-Processing-Based Inspection of a Screw Hole on a Molded Plastic Frame

Abstract

A screw hole is incorrectly molded if the pin on the mold is broken when the plastic is molded by injection molding. Sampling inspection is carried out manually to identify the incorrectly molded screw hole. In the sampling inspection, the incorrectly molded screw hole on the molded plastic frame is rarely overlooked. Therefore, the development of a system for the high-precision identification of the incorrectly molded screw hole is required.
The purpose of this study is to develop a screw-hole inspection system that distinguishes between a correctly molded screw hole and an incorrectly molded one. In this paper, a screw-hole inspection system is proposed. There is a need to capture clearly the screw hole on an uneven plastic frame and therefore, a multi-camera system is used. The proposed system consists of several Web cameras with the individual adjustable focus. Moreover, the inspection of the screw holes is performed using an inspection algorithm that is developed for a multi-camera system. When 2548 correctly molded screw holes and 2940 incorrectly molded screw holes were inspected by the proposed system, the inspection success rate was 100.0%. Finally, we have verified its effectiveness by performing an experiment.