• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.761-771
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• 2009

Detecting defects on FPD (Flat Panel Display) color filter before the full panel is made is important to reduce the manufacturing cost. Among many types of defects, the low contrast blemish such as Suzi Mura is difficult to detect using standard CCD cameras. Even skilled inspectors in the inspection line can hardly identify such defects using bare eyes. To overcome this difficulty, point spectrometer has been used to analyze the spectrum to differentiate such defects from normal color filters. However, scanning ever increasing-size color filters by a point spectrometer takes too long time to be used in real production line. We propose a system using a spectral camera which can be viewed as a line scan camera composed of an array of point spectrometers. Three types of lighting system that exhibit different illumination spectrums are devised together with a calibration method of the proposed spectral camera system. To visualize the defect areas, various processing algorithms to identify and to enhance the small differences in spectrum between defective and normal areas are developed. Experiments shows 85% successful visualization. of real samples using the proposed system.