The vision system is developed to reduce the human effort and improve productivity in the Vehicle Quality Assurance (VQA) shop for inspection of a car bearing a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), assigned to it at the assembly shop. This project work is carried out in association with M/s Renault Nissan Automotive India Pvt Ltd, Chennai.
The vision system consists of a camera fixed on a pan-tilt camera frame and an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The camera frame is mounted on a belt conveyor with remote control of forward, backward and tilting motion. The image of VIN present at the car door is captured through a digital camera placed adjacent to the car. The characters in the VIN image thus obtained are extracted using MATLAB, with configurable OCR software. Template matching method is followed in the OCR process. The MATLAB code can overcome trivial issues in VIN image inspection at the quality shop. Development of a graphic user interface to the software is also described.