Automated vision inspection in network-based production environment

Abstract

This paper presents a new, holistic, Internet-based quality control approach. In recent years, a rapidly changing business environment driven by fierce international and domestic competitions has pushed companies to focus more on quality issues. A new strategy in quality control better suited to information-integrated production environments is a natural byproduct. The new strategy is called EQM, short for e-quality for manufacture, which allows designers located away from the production facilities to monitor, control, and program the quality inspection processes as the product design evolves. EQM also allows the quality data to be integrated within the company's information network for automated quality monitoring and control functions. Such integration relieves the human operators from laborious, error-prone, and boring tasks of quality monitoring and samplings practices, which will help reduce production costs and lower the chance of shipping defective products to the customers. © 2009 Springer-Verlag London Limited.