On-line measurement of deposit dimension in spray forming using image processing technology

Image processing technology, which offers a new approach for on-line deposit dimension measurement in spray forming, has been developed in this paper. First, an adaptive smoothing operator is used to eliminate noise based on analysis of the resource of image noise. Second, a new edge detection operator—Sobel–Zernike moments operator is used to detect the edge of deposit image. Lastly, the characteristic deposit dimension such as outer diameter of a tubular deposit is calculated. Test of this new image processing method shows that the whole running time of one image processing is less than 0.987 s, while the relative error of deposit dimension measurement is lower than 0.32%, indicating that this is an on-line accurate measurement method for deposit dimension in spray forming process.