Automatic inspection of throw-away tips based on principal component analysis

The automatic inspection of throw-away tips is very important for quality control in precision cutting. We proposed an image processing based method for automatic inspection of the processing wear of throw-away tips. Our proposed method utilized principal component analysis as a preprocessing to reduce the noise and enhance the contrast of the cutting wear region with the background region. Then the PCA transformed wear region is automatically segmented by a simple thresholding method. The area of the segmented wear region is used as a measure of cutting wear degree.