Product Digital Quality Inspection using Machine Vision Systems – A Categorical Review

A key element of quality control in manufacturing is Product Inspection, which is a process that allows for verifying a product’s quality enabled by activities such as measuring, examining, and testing one or more characteristics of a product. Automated machine vision systems undertake this task for in-line, in-process inspections. Machine vision (MV) technology is designed to imitate the human visual system. The ability for computers to see the world through cameras and analyze their findings autonomously, often through deep learning, is making MV a market-disrupting technology. Many manufacturers seek to adopt this technology to improve production rates, product quality, and lower costs. The focus of this paper is to review the MV systems being developed to handle quality control, specifically product inspection tasks for various manufacturing applications. We present recently developed MV systems that perform product inspection based on free-form analysis, dimensional analysis, and surface analysis. Further, a discussion is provided to address the commonalities found in MV systems and the challenges the technologies continue to face. Additionally, each product quality inspection technique is examined for image processing techniques used.