Rapid surface defect detection based on singular value decomposition using steel strips as an example

For most surface defect detection methods based on image processing, image segmentation is a prerequisite for determining and locating the defect. In our previous work, a method based on singular value decomposition (SVD) was used to determine and approximately locate surface defects on steel strips without image segmentation. For the SVD-based method, the image to be inspected was projected onto its first left and right singular vectors respectively. If there were defects in the image, there would be sharp changes in the projections. Then the defects may be determined and located according sharp changes in the projections of each image to be inspected. This method was simple and practical but the SVD should be performed for each image to be inspected. Owing to the high time complexity of SVD itself, it did not have a significant advantage in terms of time consumption over image segmentation-based methods. Here, we present an improved SVD-based method. In the improved method, a defect-free image is considered as the reference image which is acquired under the same environment as the image to be inspected. The singular vectors of each image to be inspected are replaced by the singular vectors of the reference image, and SVD is performed only once for the reference image off-line before detecting of the defects, thus greatly reducing the time required. The improved method is more conducive to real-time defect detection. Experimental results confirm its validity. (C) 2018 Author(s).