Soft computing for automated surface quality analysis of exterior car body panels

Today the method for surface quality analysis of exterior car body panels is still characterized by manual detection of local form deviations and evaluation by experts. The new approach presented in this paper is based on 3D image processing. A major step in this process is the classification of the different kinds of surface form deviations. For this purpose, we compared the performance of different soft-computing techniques. Although the dataset was rather small, high dimensional and unbalanced, we achieved promising results with regard to classification accuracies and interpretability of rule bases. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.