Image Inspection Apparatus Alignment via Block Segmentation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional image inspection systems face accuracy issues when dealing with local misalignment caused by unevenness or paper stretching, particularly when similar patterns are present in the image, leading to decreased alignment accuracy and suboptimal inspection results.
Innovation Solution
An inspection apparatus and method that performs image simplifying processing to concatenate image elements while maintaining their positions, allowing for more accurate alignment between a reference image and a target image using moving related information, thereby preventing a decrease in alignment accuracy due to similar patterns.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If non-rigid-body alignment using free-form deformations is employed to handle local misalignment, then alignment accuracy is improved, but alignment accuracy decreases when similar patterns exist in the image
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the image into multiple blocks and performs alignment independently for each block rather than treating the entire image as a single unit. This segmentation prevents similar patterns from different regions from interfering with each other during the alignment process, thereby maintaining reliability while preserving accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different alignment processing to different blocks of the image based on local characteristics. By making the alignment quality adaptive to local image content rather than uniform across the entire image, it handles similar patterns more effectively while maintaining overall alignment accuracy.
2Device complexity
If feature points are extracted for rigid-body alignment, then the alignment process is simple, but it cannot deal with local misalignment caused by conveying unevenness or paper stretching
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the image into multiple blocks and performs free-form deformation alignment on each block independently. This segmentation approach enables the system to handle local misalignment while keeping the overall process manageable through systematic block-by-block processing.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transitions from static rigid-body alignment to dynamic free-form deformation alignment that can adapt to local variations in each image block. This dynamic approach allows the alignment to respond to conveying unevenness and paper stretching while maintaining computational feasibility.
Data Source
AI summary
An inspection apparatus for inspecting a target image that is obtained by reading an image formed on a recording medium by a printing apparatus. The inspection apparatus executes image simplifying processing for converting a plurality of image elements in image to a lump of image elements in which the plurality of image elements are concatenated, while maintaining positions of the image elements as-is, on a reference image and the target image, performs alignment between the reference image and the target image before subjected to the image simplifying processing, using moving related information regarding the alignment between the reference image and the target image based on the reference image and the target image that have been subjected to the image simplifying processing, and performs inspection by comparing the aligned reference image with the aligned target image.