Vision Inspection Method for the Quality Assessment of Paint Coatings on Glassware

Image analysis is becoming increasingly popular in many industries. Its use is perfect for, among other things, assessing the quality of products on or off the production line. Highly automated, high-performance systems can be used for this purpose. However, there are situations in which automated vision systems cannot be used on the production line due to the specific nature of the process. One such situation is testing the resistance of paint applied to glass when washing in automatic dishwashers. It is carried out outside the production line, and typical production vision systems are not used here. An attempt was made to develop a cheap and easy-to-implement research method enabling quantitative measurement of paint loss on glass when testing the coating's resistance to automatic washing. For this purpose, analysis of images taken during the study was carried out. The developed method is based on taking a series of photos of the tested object between each stage of the wash resistance test. The obtained photographic material is then analyzed by measuring the size of paint losses expressed in the number of pixels. Then, the percentage of paint loss is calculated. This method is cheap to implement and highly accurate. Statistical analysis of the results confirmed the method's accuracy at 98%.