Technology transfer of computer vision defect detection to ceramic tiles industry

Visual inspection is carried out manually in ceramic tile industry in Croatia using specially trained and skilled workers. Currently in industry biscuit and crude tiles are not visually inspected for defects. Fatigue, illness and other subjective factors significantly influence workers percentage of found defects and classification quality. In this paper we present a prototype computer vision station (CVS) for real-time biscuit tile defects detection. CVS is a result of an FP7 project. Prototype is mounted on a production conveyor line before the kiln. MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) based GUI application is created and all developed algorithms are implemented in C++ language using OpenCV and Nvidia CUDA libraries. System hardware is based on core i7 CPU and Nvidia GTX960 GPU. Preliminary results show maximum execution time below 900 ms and defect detection efficiency of 98%.