Real-Time Image-Based Defect Inspection System of Internal Thread for Nut

The most important components of the internal nut thread inspection process are measuring the pitch and pitch diameter value and comparing these with their respective specifications, as a test nut is considered to be abnormal when its pitch or pitch diameter does not meet specifications. This paper focuses on defects arising when the pitch diameter does not meet its specification. Because conventional contact strategies are not suited to the real-time inspection of internal thread defects, there have been a number of recent attempts to develop noncontact methods for real-time measurement. Some approaches have applied laser triangulation techniques in which reflected light is used to measure the z-axis depth on an object's surface. Although point lasers have been shown to be highly precise in measuring pitch diameter, the optical architecture involved in these approaches is complicated and, as the laser must be scanned in a pointwise manner to derive cross-sectional measurements, the measurement process is too long to be compatible with real-time defect inspection. In this papere, an image-based method employing a line laser projector was used to develop a real-time image-based nut pitch diameter defect inspection system. The proposed method, which improves upon the conventional, widely used template-matching method for rapid defect detection, was shown to be effective through experimental validation.