In a plant that manufactures wood products, such as lumber, dimension
stock, or veneer sheets, inspection of the products is a necessary par
t of the production process. At present, most inspection tasks are car
ried out manually. However, because of the high speed with which it is
necessary to perform the operation and the stress involved, attempts
have been made to automate this grading process. This paper surveys re
search in the field of automatic inspection of wood, particularly focu
sing on computer vision techniques. The methods are put into an Automa
ted Visual Inspection framework, which is subdivided into commonly use
d modules for image acquisition, image enhancement, image subdivision,
feature extraction, and classification.