Decision Support System for Dimensional Inspection of Extruded Rubber Profiles

Since small and medium enterprises (SME) generate the most of gross domestic product and employment opportunities in developed countries, further progress of the Industry 4.0 strongly relies on the development of dedicated solutions for SMEs-specific problems. Dimensional inspection of extruded rubber profiles represents one such an open issue in the automotive industry, which currently requires a manual measurement and comparison of profiles' cross section with the corresponding technical drawings. Starting from the requirements acquired from the industry practice, this study proposes a novel solution that automates all steps during the inspection process allowing an operator to make the final decision with respect to his observations. The proposed workflow includes the following steps: 1) image acquisition, 2) system calibration, 3) profile segmentation, 4) landmark registration and 5) augmentation of the referent technical drawing over the acquired image. The overall solution was developed by using a single camera and dedicated algorithms for profile detection and augmentation of the referent technical drawing. The extensive validation showed that the solution increased operators' productivity and reliability by a considerable margin (~6%), while it remains affordable, user-friendly and generic.