Detection of Surface Defects On Ceramic Tiles Base
Detection of Surface Defects On Ceramic Tiles Base
Detection of Surface Defects On Ceramic Tiles Base
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ABSTRACT
Ceramic tiles have become very popular and are used in the flooring of offices and shopping malls. As
testing the quality of tiles manually in a highly polluted environment in the manufacturing industry is a labor-
intensive and time consuming process, analysis is carried out on the tile images. This paper discusses an automated
system to detect the defects on the surface of ceramic tiles based on dilation, erosion, SMEE and boundary detection
techniques.
Keywords: Ceramic Tiles, Tile Defect, Structuring Element, Dilation, Erosion, Quality Control
1.0 INTRODUCTION
The techniques of image processing are being used in in the Quality Control departments of Glass industry,
Textile industry, and Ceramic industry. In ceramic tile industry many automated systems have been developed to
analyze the quality of tiles. Generally these automated systems have been developed to detect the defects only for
plane surface tiles as it is very difficult to detect the defects on designed tiles. Defects on designed tiles can be
identified based on morphological techniques. Morphological image processing is a set of non-linear operations
associated with the shape or morphology of features in an image. Montreal & Quebec, (2006) described the need for
detecting edges of images and proposed edge detection methods such as Canny and Sobel [1]. These methods were
applied on images of ceramic tiles with defect based on color and surface. Ar & Akgul, (2008) presented marble tile
feature extraction system which can be easily used for any classification system [2]. Image processing techniques
especially Gabor filtering was engaged to differentiate between different marble textures and a new verification
method on the basis of the inter-expert variability was presented and the percentages of veins, spots, and swirls on
the marble images were calculated. Therefore, the system was considered as the core engine of a very portable
marble tile classification system. Hocenski & Vasilic, (2006) proposed the method for faults detection based on edge
detection techniques using Canny edge detector [3]. Histogram subtraction method was used to fix problem of
defining hysteresis threshold and edge and surface faults were identified.
Morphological techniques scan an image with a small shape or template called a structuring element. The
structuring element serves as a key in identifying the defect on tiles. The structuring element is positioned at all
possible locations in the image and it is compared with the corresponding neighborhood of pixels. Certain
operations test whether the element fits within the neighborhood and others test whether it hits or intersects the
neighborhood.
Defect Description
Blob Water drop spot on the surface
Corner Break down in the corner of tile
Crack Break in tile
Edge Break in edge
Glaze Blurred surface on the tile
Pinhole Isolated black-white pinpoint spot
Scratch Scratch on surface
Spot Discontinuity of color on the surface
The morphological operations like Dilation, Erosion, Dilation and Erosion, Simple Morphological Edge
Extraction (SMEE), and Boundary Extraction techniques are used in identifying the different types of defects. This
paper proposes an efficient defect detection and classification technique that would find out the defects on ceramic
tiles at a higher rate within a very short span of time. Table 1 describes the different types of defects on the surface
of ceramic tiles.
The morphological operators centered on dilation and erosion are Opening and Closing. Opening
smoothens the contour of images by breaking narrow gaps and eliminating small holes or thin protrusions. The
Opening of an image A by a structuring element B (denoted by A ° B) is given by the successive operations of
erosion and dilation and is given by the expression
A ° B= (A Θ B) ⊕ B … … … (1)
Closing tends to smoothen the contour of an image by fusing narrow breaks and long thin gulfs, and
eliminates small holes by filling gaps in the contour. The Closing of an image A by a structuring element B (denoted
by A⋅B) is given by the successive operations of dilation and erosion and is represented by the expression
A ⋅ B= (A ⊕ B) Θ B … … … (2)
Dilation and erosion are the fundamental morphological operations. Dilation adds pixels to the boundaries
of objects in an image, while erosion removes pixels on object boundaries. The number of pixels added or removed
from the objects in an image depends on the size and shape of the structuring element used to process the image.
2.1 DILATION
Dilation is the addition of a pixel at object boundary based on a structuring element. It is defined as the
maximum value in the window. The image after dilation will be brighter with an increase in intensity. It enlarges the
image objects by changing pixels with the value of “0” to “1”. Foreground pixels are denoted by 1's and background
pixels by 0's.To compute the dilation of a binary input image based on the structuring element consider each of the
background pixels in the input image and superimpose the structuring element on top of the input image so that the
origin of the structuring element coincides with the input pixel position. If anyone pixel in the structuring element
coincides with a foreground pixel in the mage underneath, then the input pixel is set to the foreground value. If all
the corresponding pixels in the image are background, however, the input pixel is left at the background value. The
dilation operation is pictorially epitomized in Figure 1.
Step 3: Apply closing operator on the binary image using structuring element.
Step 4: Apply opening operator on the resulting image obtained in step 3 with the same structuring element.
Step 5: Apply closing operator once again on the resultant image obtained in step 4.
Step 8: Finally, subtract the closed image in Step 6 from the dilated image obtained in Step 7.
2.2. EROSION
The inverse of dilation is erosion and it is defined as the minimum value in the window. It removes the
pixel from the object boundary based on the structuring element. The image after erosion will be darker than the
original image. Erosion shrinks the images by altering the pixels with the value of “1” to “0”. The erosion operation
is pictorially exemplified in Figure 2.
Step 3: Apply closing operator on the binary image using structuring element.
Step 4: Apply opening operator on the image obtained in step 3 with the same structuring element.
Step 7: Erode the image obtained in Step 5 with the same structuring element.
Step 8: Finally, add the closed image obtained in Step 6 with the eroded image obtained in Step 7.
SMEE= (A ⊕ B) - A
… … … (5)
2.3.1 PROCEDURE FOR SMEE
Step 1: Obtain the input image.
β (A) = A – (A Θ B) … … … (8)
Step 2: Erosion operation is applied on the input image, which increases on the black pixels.
BE = img - E1 … … … (10)
3.0 METHODOLOGY
To identify the different types of defects on the surface of tiles based on the above said procedures the
morphological operations - Dilation, Erosion, Dilation and Erosion, Simple Morphological Edge Extraction
(SMEE), and Boundary Extraction techniques are used. On the basis of the pixel count of both the reference and test
images, the ceramic tile images are tested and classified as either defect-free or defective. The pixel count of the
image is computed by determining the number of picture elements (pixels).
In each method, the pixel count of the test image and that of the standard defect free image (reference
image) are calculated. If the pixel count of the tile image that is tested for defect (D1) is greater than the pixel count
of the reference image (defect free image) (R1), then it is classified as a defective tile otherwise it is a defect-free
tile.
∆d=R1- D1 … … … (11)
where R1 is the pixel count of the standard defect free image (reference image) and D1 is the pixel count of
the image being tested. For a defective tile, the defect, ∆d of the image will be negative (< 0).
The PSNR and MSE values are also calculated for each of the method applied to obtain a more precise and
clear idea of the defective images. In addition, comparison is done based on the time complexity to identify the
method that finds out the different types of defects quickly.
Figure 5: Dilation
Figure 6 shows the implementation of erosion operation on the three defective tile images.
Figure 6: Erosion
Figure 7 shows the implementation of SMEE operation on the three defective tile images.
Figure 7: SMEE
Figure 8 shows the implementation of boundary extraction operation on the three defective tile images.
Table 2 tabulates the pixel count of the standard defect free tile image (reference tile) and that of the
defective tile images that are tested based on the four different operations.
It is clear from Table 2 that the pixel count of the defective tiles are greater than that of the standard defect
free tile (reference tile image) indicating that the tested tile images are defective.
Peak signal-to-noise ratio, often abbreviated as PSNR gives an approximation to human perception of
reconstruction quality. A higher PSNR value generally indicates that the reconstruction is of higher quality.
… … … (12)
where MAXI is the maximum possible pixel value of the image. MAX I is 255When the pixels are
represented using 8 bits per sample.
Table 3 tabulates the PSNR value obtained for the four different operations on the three defective tiles.
Table 3: PSNR
Given a noise-free m x n monochrome image I and its noisy approximation K, the mean squared
error (MSE) is defined as:
… … … (13)
Table 4 tabulates the PSNR value obtained for the four different operations on the three defective tiles.
Table 4: MSE
Based on Table 3, PSNR value of dilation method is high and based on Table 4, MSE value of the same
method (dilation) has a low value. Therefore, from the above four methods, dilation method is considered to be the
best method to detect the different types of defects.
The time taken to detect the different defects according to different morphological methods is calculated.
Table 5 represents the time complexity involved in the four different operations. According to Table 5, Simple
Morphological Edge Extraction operation takes the least time to detect the cracks, Pinholes and Blob defects.
Figure 11 represents the time taken to detect the different types of defects.
6. CONCLUSION
In ceramic tile manufacturing industries, quality control is a labor intensive process and has to be
performed in a highly polluted industrial environment. This work will assist the quality control department of tile
manufacturing industries in determining and identifying the defects in the surface of the ceramic tiles based on the
morphological operations such as Dilation, Erosion, SMEE and Boundary Extraction with the help of the tile
images.
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