Construction of an automatic inspection system with capability of identifying color characteristics of product

There are many products are qualified by the color quality characteristics, such as color of textile, color of painting on objects and so on. In general, how to inspect the product is based on the inspectors' eyes. Although the inspectors follow the standard inspection procedure and have the standard color sample for inspection, there are still a minor discrepancy occurred each time because of fatigue and illumination change. The result could be customers claim to rejection, this kind of incorrect judgment will directly affect the profit of company. In this research, based on the inspection of machine vision we want to construct an automatic inspection system to identify color characteristics of product on LabVIEW platform. In the system, image of retrieved area will be grabbed under a steady light environment and the object will be digitized into gray level. Then the contour of gray level will be used as an edge. For color identification purpose, further processed image will compare with the color sample database. Finally, accept or reject the product lot is dependent on the defined and trained threshold value. Through the system we constructed, there are some accomplishments: reduce the possibility of misjudgment made by inspectors' eyes, enhance the capability of identifying color quality characteristics level of product, speed-up identification process, increase the yield rate of product, and reduce the labor cost.