• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.459-464
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• 2015

An on-line quality control of hot steel products is one of the important issues in the steel industry because of cost minimization. In recent years, relative depth information of surface defects is increasingly required for strict quality control. In this paper, a 3D shape reconstruction scheme for defects on a hot steel surface based on a multi-spectral photometric stereo method is proposed. After simultaneously illuminating a hot steel surface by using vertical/horizontal linearly polarized lights of green and blue light sources, the corresponding 4 images are obtained. The photometric stereo method is then applied with the aid of a GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) to reconstruct the shape of the target surface based on these images. The proposed scheme was validated through experiments.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.1061-1066
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• 2013

In the steel industry, the detection of tiny defects including its 3D characteristics on steel surfaces is very important from the point of view of quality control. A multi-spectral photometric stereo method is an attractive scheme because the shape of the defect can be obtained based on the images which are acquired at the same time by using a multi-channel camera. Moreover, the calculation time required for this scheme can be greatly reduced for real-time application with the aid of a GPU (Graphic Processing Unit). Although a more reliable shape reconstruction of defects can be possible when the numbers of available images are increased, it is not an easy task to construct a camera system which has more than 3 channels in the visible light range. In this paper, a new 6-channel camera system, which can distinguish the vertical/horizontal linearly polarized lights of RGB light sources, was developed by adopting two 3-CCD cameras and two polarized lenses based on the fact that the polarized light is preserved on the steel surface. The photometric stereo scheme with 6 images was accelerated by using a GPU, and the performance of the proposed system was validated through experiments.