The Classification of defected oil-seals using a vision system with the artificial neural network is presented. The artificial neural network for classification consists of 27 input nodes, 10 hidden nodes, and one output node. The selection of the number of the input nodes is based on an observation that the difference among the defected, non-defected, and smeared oil-seals is greatly pronounced in the 26 step gray-scale level thresholding. The number of the hidden nodes is chosen as a result of a trade-off between accuracy and computing time. The back -propagation algorithm is used for teaching the network. The proposed network is capable of successfully classifying the defected from the smeared oil-seals which tend to be classified as the defected ones using the binary thresholding. It is envisaged that the proposed method improves the reliability and productivity of the automotive vision inspection system.
