An Advanced Vision System for the Automatic Inspection of Corrosions on Pole Tips in Hard Disk Drives

Pole tips of hard disk drives are made of FeCo film, which is prone to corrosion due to the corrosive nature of the environment and wide range of pH experienced during the production. A machine vision system is utilized for the automatic auditing of corroded pole tips. This comprises three steps: 1) extraction of the top shield region; 2) fusion of extracted features; and 3) decision making. This model is capable of detecting corrosion in the critical part of the pole tips. The experiments show that the proposed system detects corrosion with high accuracy, whereas the overall processing time meets industrial requirements.