Real-time defect detection of saw chains on automatic assembly lines based on residual networks and knowledge coding

The use of machine vision methods has rapidly developed for detecting product defects, but it remains challenging to identify shape and color defects as well as the assembly relationship of parts due to occlusion between components and changes in assembly structures. This paper proposed a method for detecting saw chain assembly defects based on residual networks and knowledge coding to achieve parts segmentation and identification of assembly defects. Firstly, we design an adaptive segmentation algorithm for saw chain parts, which uses the Hough transform to locate rivets and completes the image segmentation based on the inherent assembly features between parts. Secondly, A trained ResNet (Residual Network) based deep learning model was used to identify the individual defects of saw chain parts, in which the transfer learning method was used to improve the detection speed of individual defects. Finally, a parallel inference method based on a knowledge encoding matrix is proposed for detecting part defects and constructing a sparse matrix to locate assembly defects. Evaluating the proposed method in building a saw chain testing platform. Results show that the proposed method can achieve real-time and high-precision detection requirements in different application scenarios. The detection accuracy on individual and assembly defects reaches 94.2% and 89.2%, respectively, which is better than the current state-of-the-art object detection models. Assembly defect detection methods are an important reference for inspecting other types of simple assemblies in the industry.