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Since small and medium enterprises (SME) generate the most of gross domestic product and employment opportunities in developed countries, further progress of the Industry 4.0 strongly relies on the development of dedicated solutions for SMEs-specific problems. Dimensional inspection of extruded rubber profiles represents one such an open issue in the automotive industry, which currently requires a manual measurement and comparison of profiles' cross section with the corresponding technical drawings. Starting from the requirements acquired from the industry practice, this study proposes a novel solution that automates all steps during the inspection process allowing an operator to make the final decision with respect to his observations. The proposed workflow includes the following steps: 1) image acquisition, 2) system calibration, 3) profile segmentation, 4) landmark registration and 5) augmentation of the referent technical drawing over the acquired image. The overall solution was developed by using a single camera and dedicated algorithms for profile detection and augmentation of the referent technical drawing. The extensive validation showed that the solution increased operators' productivity and reliability by a considerable margin (~6%), while it remains affordable, user-friendly and generic.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful technique in materials science, in particular for the analysis of polymer and rubber materials. So far the use of this technique for quality control has not been fully explored mainly because of the prohibitive costs and maintenance associated with conventional MRI tomography systems. This constraint has been removed recently since robust and mobile desktop tomographs with permanent magnets have become available at reduced cost. In this work we apply an image processing chain algorithm to MR images of rubber profiles recorded with a desktop MRI scanner. Although the nominal spatial resolution of MR images is inherently lower than that of optical methods, we demonstrate that the digital resolution achieved after the image processing steps allows one to determine the spatial positions of the inner and outer contours with 50 μm precision. Using this information it is then possible to measure structural dimensions of the rubber profiles, such as wall thickness or internal voids, with precisions that are of the same order of magnitude as those observed with CT or camera imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]