Online surface inspection for continuous cast-aluminum strip

Resumen

A general architecture for detecting and analyzing surface defects in aluminum strip is described. Information concerning visual information from the aluminum surface, surface temperature and strip dimensions--profile thickness-is processed jointly by means of an expert system in order to determine the quality level of each aluminum coil produced; control actions over the casting process, derived from this information, are also suggested by an expert system. This paper shows in deep work related to surface image analysis. The data volume to be processed, up to 20 Mbytes/s, has forced up the development of a high parallel architecture for high-speed image processing. A specially suitable lighting system has been developed for enhancing matrical image acquisition from metallic surfaces that includes reflect avoidance as well as uniform incident angle of light along the scanned portion of surface--about 120000 square mm.