Real-time automatic machine inspection of plastic bottle closures

Abstract

This thesis presents work done developing an automatic system for plastic bottle closures. These plastic closures ae manufactured at 20 per second and the inspection must be done in real-time at this rate. Two types of defects must be detected and the defective closures removed from the production line. Inspection by human operators proved to be unreliable and subjective, and an automatic inspection system was needed. A machine vision system is capable of producing reliable and repeatable results in an environment which is unpleasant to humans. An automatic inspection system was implemented on the production line. The development of this system is divided into three sections.