Defect detection system for quality assurance using automated visual inspection

A defect detection method and system for the automated visual inspection of web materials is provided. The invention utilize real Gabor function (RGF) filters with a non-linear function for estimating the local energy. An example method for quality assurance using automated visual inspection in accordance with the invention includes the steps of: automated design of a bank of RGF filters; using these RGF filters to sample the features of image under inspection; using a non-linear function to compute local energy estimate in the filtered images; combining all the filtered images using image fusion; and finally thresholding the resultant image to segment the defects in the inspection image. Possible embodiments of the described invention include detection of only a class of defects using a single tuned real Gabor filter or a bank of real Gabor functions.published_or_final_versio