Distributed Image Processing System for the Monitoring of Hot Steel Wire

摘要

In a prototype for mbnitoring hot steel wire different technologies are integrated to achieve a robust, flexibly configurable and scalable imaging system. It is designed as a distributed system with private network and Tuplespace communication implementable on a LINUX~R Server. Intelligent cameras grab and process the image data. For real time communication between the cameras and standard industrial I/O-modules (IEC-61131) MODBUS/TCP messaging is applied. A switch with integrated firewall makes services available to the supervisory control system. Results are available as XML-logfiles. The image processing defines the upper and lower edges of the material by minimum/maximum filtering of the y-gradient. Dual Grassmanian coordinates are used to fit two parallel lines to the edge points by singular value decomposition. This gives the distance between the lines and the confidence interval of each measurement simultaneously, whereas latter is used to reject poor data. Changes of the distance are analysed computing local central moments. Presently, 12 images per second are acquired. The application is able to detect spontaneous rotation of the wire around the axis of rolling directly at the rolling stands and treats also poor images (due to steam of cooling water). It indicates resulting defects, which may go undetected otherwise.