Design and Development of a Novel Lighting System for Car Wiper Arm Defects Inspection

Quality control is an essential process for production to ensure that the quality of products meets the expectations and requirements of the customer. In the production of the components for the car wiper system, a major and important component is the wiper arm. Defects on the wiper arm may bring negative impact on it's market value. Hence, defects inspection of the car wiper arms is essential and important to ensure a consistent quality. However there are still many challenges faced by the inspection system, including different types of defects, reflective surfaces, and false detection - including perfectly good parts wrongly classified as defective. A typical automated defect inspection has three major parts - image capture and processing, intelligent defect detection algorithm and finally, the lighting system. Therefore, this paper proposes a new lighting technique to help improve the defect detection of wiper arms. The goal of this new lighting system is to enhance the defects contrast and improve the accuracy of defects inspections in wiper. The accuracy of the proposed new lighting system is studied and compared with the standard direct lighting system. Our proposed new lighting was able to show an improvement of 12.50% on the set of wipers over the standard lighting system used previously.