Abstract
DC motor shafts have several defects such as double cut, deep scratch on surface, and defects in diameter and length. The deep scratches are due to collision among the other shafts. So the scratches are long and thin but their orientations are random. If the smallest enclosing box, i.e. oriented bounding box for a detective point group is found, then the size of the corresponding defect can be modeled as its diagonal length. This paper proposes an suface inspection algorithm for the DC motor shaft using the oriented bounding box. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, a test bed is made with a line scan CCD camera (4096 pixels/line) and two rollers mechanism to rotate the shaft. The experimental result on a pre-processed image with contrast streching algorithm, shows that the proposed algorithm sucessfully finds 150 surface defects and its computation time (0.291 msec) is enough fast for the requirement (4 seconds).