Making Tears in Paper Visible with AI Visual Inspection: A FORESIGHT STEREO Application Example
kotai2003Background
On manufacturing floors, even a slight tear or fold in paper, or a foreign particle, can lead directly to a quality problem. Yet defects in thin, glossy paper materials are often missed even by skilled inspectors, and this has been regarded as an area that is very hard to automate.
To detect such "defects that are hard to see by eye" with high accuracy, TOMOMI RESEARCH developed FORESIGHT STEREO, an imaging technology built on our own lighting technique, which works together with AI algorithms in our visual inspection solutions.
Features of FORESIGHT STEREO
FORESIGHT STEREO is an imaging technology that "captures in three dimensions" the relief of a surface and fine changes in its structure.
Our own lighting technique reconstructs relief information in 3D while suppressing gloss and reflection
Clearly visualizes "tears," "wrinkles," "dents," and other defects that were previously hard to see
Combined with our E3 ENGINE, it builds a high-accuracy AI model from good-product images only
Supports high-mix, low-volume production, with a track record of adoption at small and medium-sized enterprises
Application Example
In this case, the challenge was to detect a slight "tear" in a paper material. Below are the images used in the actual inspection.
📷 Top: ordinary photograph (the tear is hard to make out even with the naked eye)
📷 Bottom: 3D surface data from FORESIGHT STEREO (the depression at the tear is clearly shown)
Video
The actual inspection and the processing steps are also shown on our YouTube channel.
See the link below for details:
