Inspection of polarizer tiny bump defects using computer vision

Abstract

In recent years, the demand of polarizer films has increased since that liquid crystal displays are widely used in consumer electronics products such as smart phones, tablet computers and large-size TVs. For improving production yields, manufacturers actively adopt automated inspection equipment to detect in-line polarizer film defects. This study uses computer vision techniques to develop a cost-effective optical detection system for the tiny bump defects of polarizer films. The proposed system applies digital fringes and image processing techniques to detect the tiny bump defects. Experiments show that the proposed system can effectively detect the tiny bump defects, and complete the defect inspection of a sample polarizer film with an area of 1600 × 1200 pixels (36mm × 27mm) within 0.3 seconds.