An automatic optical sensor for vessels and fibbers quality inspection in pulp production

Wood quality assessment is an important issue in the pulp and paper industr y. In this paper an automatic visual inspection system for wood structural quality measurement is described. To improve statistical image segmentation a new logarithm based global contrast enhancement technique is described. Region identification and reconstruction is performed based on local morpho logical operators with constrained merge operations. A measurement techniqu e, build-up upon a constrained optimisation problem, is described for fibbe r wall width computation. The method proves computational efficiency. The d escribed inspection system uses only two control parameters. (C) 1999 Elsev ier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.