Matlab based automated surface defect detection system for ceremic tiles using image processing

In Ceramic tile industry the quality control process plays a major role to enhance quality standards. Still quality control of ceramic tile industry is done mostly by manually. Manual inspection is labor intensive, costly and less in efficiency. Further, the accuracy of the defect detection is lower due to harsh industrial environment and human errors. To overcome such drawbacks this project proposes an automated inspection system for ceramic tile industry based on image processing techniques. This system can detect color variations and defects such as corner damages, edge damages and middle cracks on the surface of the tile with high accuracy and efficiency. The tiles are compared with a good quality reference tile using image processing concepts using Matlab software. Based on this comparison the tile quality is classified. The system was checked with 110 real ceramic tiles consisting of defected tiles with cracks, corner damages and color variations. The results were outstanding with of 96.36% detection accuracy rate. The processing time for one tile was approximately 2 seconds. This outstanding achievement of results reflects that this automated system can effectively replace manual ceramic tile detection system with better accuracy and efficiency.