Vision system using linear CCD cameras in fluorescent magnetic particle inspection of axles of railway wheelsets

Automatic magnetic particle inspection based vision system using CCD camera is a new development of magnetic particle inspection. A vision system using linear CCD cameras in semiautomatic fluorescent magnetic particle inspection of axles of railway wheelsets is presented in this paper. The system includes four linear CCD cameras, a PCI data acquisition & logic control card, and an industrial computer. The unique characteristic of striation induced by UV light flicker in scanning image acquired by linear CCD camera are investigated, and some digital image processing methods for images of magnetic particle indications are designed to identify the cracks, including image pre-processing using wavelet, edge detection based connected region using Candy operator and double thresholds. The experimental results show that the system can detect the article cracks effectively, and may improve inspection quality highly and increase productivity practically.