Recent trends for the miniaturization and weight reduction of portable electronic parts is the use of subminiature components. Assembly of the miniaturized components requires subminiature screws of which pitch sizes are in a micrometer scale. To produce such a subminiature screw with high precision threads, not only a precision forming technology but also high-precision measurement technique is required. In the present work, a vision inspection system is developed to measure the thread profile of a subminiature screw. Optical simulation based on a ray tracing method is used to design and analyze the optical system of the vision inspection apparatus. Through this simulation, optical performance of the developed vision inspection system is optimized. The image processing algorithm for the precision screw inspection is also discussed.
