CIS3D - EUROSTARS

Completeness inspection is an important step in industrial assembly processes. It is usually an end-of-line inspection to check whether any parts are missing and whether they are correctly positioned and assembled. Completeness inspection with cameras in 2D faces a few challenges that are hard to overcome with conventional methods. The main source of all these methods is the fact that 3D information is missing and that it is economically unfeasible - and some times even not possible- to obtain an optimal view of each single part of the inspected part.

We will solve this problem by developing a technology that allows the creation of a 3D appearance model from a number of regular 2D images taken with conventional cameras. From this set of oblique images we produce “ortho-images” that represent a parallel, orthogonal projection of the object, similar to technical line drawings, but extended with color and texture. This enables us to calculate a very large number of views of the object, each chosen in such a way that the part to be inspected can be optimally seen in the image.

With this technology we will be able to substantially extend the capabilities of completeness inspection systems. The target market will be end-of-line inspection systems for manufacturing and assembly lines with cycle times in the range of 2-30 seconds. The resulting product will be called CIS3D and will consist of an image acquisition system, including high-resolution cameras and illumination, and a software that performs completeness inspection on an arbitrarily large set of ortho-images that are generated from a few oblique 2D images.

The intended market of the CIS3D product is machine vision companies and system integrators. The machine vision market in Europe has a size of approximately 3.000 MEURs. In the area of “discrete inspection”, which amounts to 40% of all machine vision systems, the subtopic of “completeness inspection” accounts for roughly 50% of the applications. The CIS3D technology has a high potential of opening new market opportunities, because many of the applications that involve very complex assemblies, detailed inspection and non-rigid objects are among those that are not yet solved.