Capsule image segmentation in pharmaceutical applications using edge-based techniques

Real-time quality inspection of gelatin capsules in pharmaceutical applications is an important issue from the point of view of industry productivity and competitiveness. Computer vision-based automatic quality inspection and controller system is one of the solutions to this problem. In computer-vision based system a digital image obtained by a digital camera would usually have 24-bit color image. The analysis of an image with that many levels might require complicated image processing techniques. But in real-time application, where a part has to be inspected within a few milliseconds, either we have to reduce the image to a more manageable number of grey levels, usually two levels (binary image), and at the same time retain all necessary features of the original image or develop a complicated technique. A binary image can be obtained by thresholding the original image into two levels that is used as an input to the high throughput quality inspection system. In this paper, we develop a system using edge-based image segmentation techniques for quality inspection that satisfy the industrial requirements in pharmaceutical applications.