Fault detection and localization in empty water bottles through machine vision

This paper presents a vision-based approach for fault detection for the empty water bottles. The goal of our approach is to find all defects in the empty water bottles. The main constraint is the real time operation as the bottles move continuously on the conveyer belt. Using images obtained from the camera, we first find the position of the bottle in the image by generalized Hough transform. Then we check the bottles for any defects or presence of alien objects using rectangular and circular areas intensity inspection. The bottles with any defects are rejected and so separated from the main stream. In the statistics obtained, our inspection system successfully rejected all the faulty or defected bottles. The good bottle rejection rate was also lower than 1 % of the total number of bottles inspected. This system can be used for inspecting any type of empty bottles for defects or presence of alien objects