About acquiring and processing light transport matrices for transparent object inspection

Abstract

Abstract Transparent materials are employed for creating different kinds of products and have to meet high quality requirements. First of all, transparent materials have to be free from scattering defects, e.g., enclosed air bubbles. Visual inspection systems based on dark field setups are principally capable of imaging these kinds of defects, however, it usually requires much effort to adapt them to the test object on hand. This article shows how light transport matrices can be calculated for an optical system consisting of a programmable area light source and a telecentric camera. Two features are proposed that can be extracted out of these matrices and that allow to image scattering defects present in a transparent object without the need of adapting the system to the actual test object. The results of synthetic experiments obtained using a physically based and adequately extended rendering framework approved the proposed approach and showed that it even outperforms classical inspection systems in some situations.