A Big Data Application in Manufacturing Industry-Computer Vision to Detect Defects on Bearings

In the contemporary rotating machinery, bearings are critical and indispensable parts. Early detection of rolling bearing defects carries crucial importance, because undetected defects on the rolling bearings may end in loss of time, resources, money and even lives. In parallel to the accelerated utilization of deep learning applications in the manufacturing industry, different studies have been conducted to determine and evaluate defects on the surfaces of rolling bearings. In this study, a new system, that contains a hardware platform and software components in order to detect surface defects of the metal rolling bearings has been developed. To detect defects, optic image data of the bearings were used, and then computer vision and artificial intelligence techniques were applied to them. In the system, TC-VISION, the source of big data is the platform designed and developed using the optical camera. The results of the applied CNN algorithms performed better than the targeted values with respect to several metrics. The F1 score obtained is close to 100%. The developed system is aimed to be enhanced further in order to develop a fully automated inspection and quality control system for metal rolling bearing systems appropriate for serial production in real industrial environments.