Quality control of safety belts by machine vision inspection for real-time production

Safety belts are specific fabrics manufactured to ensure the highest performance. Their manufacturing process not only has to assure its endurance to high tension strength, but also has to guarantee its correct visual appearance. Safety belts must not contain fiber breaks, knots, thickness variations, etc. Such defects imply the unfulfillment of rigorous safety standards. We describe the development of a computer vision inspection system, which control safety belts at a speed rate of 2 m/s. This inspection rate has been achieved by means of a parallel architecture and the use of optimized vision algorithms.