Automated Surface Defect Detection Using High-Density Data

State-of-the-art measurement technologies, such as 3D laser scanners, provide new opportunities for knowledge discovery and development of quality control (QC) strategies for complex manufacturing systems. These technologies can rapidly provide millions of data points to represent a manufactured part's surface. The resulting high-density (HD) datasets have a great potential to be used for inspecting parts for surface and feature abnormalities. The current use of these datasets for part inspection can be divided into two main categories: (1) extracting feature parameters, which does not complement the nature of these datasets as it wastes valuable data and (2) an ad hoc inspection process, where a visual representation of the data is manually analyzed, which tends to suffer from slow, inefficient, and inconsistent inspection results. To overcome these deficiencies, this paper proposes an adaptive generalized likelihood ratio (AGLR) technique to automate the surface defect inspection process using HD data. This paper presents the performance results of the proposed AGLR approach with respect to the probability of detecting varying size and magnitude defects in addition to the probability of false alarms. In addition, a formal approach for designing an optimal AGLR inspection system is proposed. Finally, simulation results are presented and analyzed to showcase the performance gains of the AGLR approach versus a more traditional generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) approach.