Measurement and Quality Control of the Geometrical Parameters of Helical Gear Using Image Processing

Measurement of industrial parts such as gear is accomplished by various contact and non-contact methods. In this research dimensional inspection of the spur gear was developed through a non-contact method, namely “Machine Vision”, to find out the errors of general design parameters of gear as well as its teeth profile errors. For this purpose, a software was developed in LabVIEW environment. This software after acquiring the image of gear and implementing some low-level processes such as low-pass filtering, look up table transformation and image calibration, by performing some high-level process such as particle analysis, edge detection and geometrical operation can firstly finds out the gear location in the image and then can calculate it's geometrical parameters. This method has some advantages such as low cost, high speed, practicability of on-line measurement, ability to intelligent detecting the dimensional parameters of gear without need to importing data.