Precision screws have a wide range of industrial applications such as electrical and automotive products. To produce screw threads with high precision, not only high precision manufacturing technology but also reliable measurement technology is required. Machine vision systems have been used in the automatic inspection of screw threads based on backlight illumination, which cannot detect defects on the thread surface. Recently, an omnidirectional inspection system for screw threads was developed to obtain 360o images of screws, based on front light illumination. In this study, the illumination design for the omnidirectional inspection system was modified by adding a light shield to improve the image uniformity. Optical simulation for various shield designs was performed to analyze image uniformity of the obtained images. The simulation results were analyzed statistically using response surface method, from which optical performance of the omnidirectional inspection system could be optimized in terms of image quality and uniformity.
