At Saitama Institute of Technology, which promotes industry-academia-government collaboration, utilizing the research results of Associate Professor Naoki Kawada (Production Process Laboratory), Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, on how to discriminate the color pattern of decorative boards by image processing, "Color Pattern Sensor ™" through industry-academia collaboration. Was jointly developed.
"Color Pattern Sensor ™" is a sensor device that can identify subtle differences in patterns and textures of building materials. It prevents materials from being mixed up and automates inspections that rely on the human eye.In the joint research and development system, Nishitec Co., Ltd. is in charge of device design, production, and sales, and Imagium Co., Ltd. is in charge of system design and software implementation.Associate Professor Naoki Kawata cooperated in developing a high-precision discrimination method by utilizing the research results of the color pattern discrimination method for decorative boards by image processing.
The decorative board is a material used for the interior of houses and vehicles, the surface of furniture, etc., and most of them are made of resin as a base material, and a layer that expresses a color pattern by printing or spraying is formed on the surface thereof.Since there are a wide variety of designs, in the process of manufacturing a product using a decorative board, boards with similar appearances are mistakenly combined, resulting in defects.In the past, these designs were distinguished by the skills of field workers, but the problem was that they depended on human feelings and experience.
As a solution to this problem, we have developed a "color pattern sensor ™" that has the function of extracting a lot of information from the appearance of the target plate material, and devised a method to combine it with image processing.This time, it was found that the image processing method using the MT system is useful for discriminating various designs. "Color pattern sensor ™" is a unit that integrates an image sensor and a pattern lighting device and covers the surrounding area with a case to eliminate the influence of ambient light as much as possible.A light-shielding cover made of soft resin was attached to the surface in contact with the object to be measured so that there would be no gaps due to slight irregularities so that there would be no variation due to differences in the measurer or the object to be measured.
In this research, we developed "color pattern sensor ™" as hardware, and also imported the signal acquired from the sensor into the PC as image data, and software with MT system function that enables image processing function and pattern recognition. developed.
Saitama Institute of Technology is promoting education that is ahead of social needs, such as launching a major in AI and IoT as soon as possible.Although it is an industrial university, it also has a faculty of human and social studies, which is a faculty of liberal arts, and has a system that can respond to requests from a wide range of fields.The research seeds born at Saitama Institute of Technology like this time aim to contribute to society through industry-academia-government exchanges in collaboration with many companies. We are actively responding to the needs of.
