Abstract
In this paper, surface defects and typical illumination mechanisms for steel plates are analyzed, and then optimum illumination mechanism is selected using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) synthetic images and discriminant measure (DM). The DWT synthetic images are generated using component images decomposed by Haar wavelet transform filter. The best synthetic image according to surface defects is determined using signal to noise ratio (SNR). The optimum illumination mechanism is selected by applying discriminant measure (DM) to the best synthetic images. The DM is applied using the tenengrad-euclidian function. The DM is evaluated as the degree of contrast using the defect boundary information. The performance of the optimum illumination mechanism is verified by quantitative data and intuitive image looks.