Image Acquisition and Segmentation for Ceramic Bearing Ball Surface Inspection System

Abstract

Surface and subsurface defects in ceramic bearing balls significantly affect ball strength and lifetime. A brief review of nondestructive evaluation technologies on hybrid bearing balls was presented. An automatic ceramic bearing ball surface inspection system based on computer image technology was developed. Various surface defects were imaged by microscope and image digitizer on a novel ball surface unfolding mechanism. Top-hat and logarithm transformations were applied to eliminate uneven lighting disturbance. An automatic seeded region growing algorithm based on histogram concavity analyses and Otsu's method was developed for defects segmentation. The results show that the experimental system is effective for ceramic ball surface and subsurface defects detection.

Multi-scale decomposition enhancement algorithm for surface defect images of Si3N4 ceramic bearing balls based on stationary wavelet transform

“…Therefore, the above-mentioned enhancement algorithm is difficult to achieve a satisfactory enhancement effect. Yang et al [27] proposed a ceramic ball defect detection system based on machine vision, using high heat filter and median filter algorithm to preprocess, and using the region growth algorithm to extract the defect area. However, due to the limitation of the depth of field of the microscope, the detection system is only suitable for ceramic balls with a diameter of more than 10 mm, and the single effective detection area is small.…”

Vision-based surface defect inspection of metal balls

“…Machine vision provides a straightforward way for detecting defects, particularly those of the surface. There are some vision systems that have been developed for inspecting ceramic balls [4,5], but the visual inspection of metal balls is more difficult because of the specular light reflectance from the shiny surface. Unlike the case of a flat metal surface [6], the reflectance by the spherical shape of a ball is nonuniform, and this exacerbates the difficulty.…”