ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLIED TO QUALITY DEFECTS CLASSIFICATION FOR TYRES

Abstract

The manufacture of radial tires is complex, and for this reason some defects inevitably end up appearing in the production process. Currently the commonly used defect detection is manual detection, among these techniques are ultrasound testing, thermal detection, X-ray detection, digital holography, among others. The X-ray or technical radiography allows the analysis of all the internal components of the tire, such as the bead structure and the different layers of rubber and cords, whether metallic or textile. The task of detecting defects using X-ray images is done manually, which causes loss of time and costs for the company. Furthermore, it is a subjective, inefficient, time-consuming and even biased process as it requires a high level of concentration and focus. The objective of this work is the digitization of the conventional process of analysis of quality failures in metallic radial tires using algorithms developed with Artificial Intelligence resources, capable of identifying and classifying defects present in X-Ray images. This work presents a brief introduction about what the tire is, as well as the development of the proposed algorithm, using classic image segmentation techniques with a Computer Vision library and two different convolutional neural network structures. Through the comparison, it was verified that the algorithm based on U-Net obtained more relevant results, however, the algorithm based on Mask R-CNN was also promising and could be useful in new works, with a larger database and different settings parameters.