Development of Surface Inspection Machine for Organic Photo Conductor(OPC)

The OPC is one of the most important component in the electrophotography process. So far its surface defects which degrade print quality were inspected by human-eye. We have developed the OPC surface inspection system employing an image processing technique. In this paper, we describe (1) an optical system to get the OPC surface image, (2) its analysis algorithm to specify the various defects and (3) the hardwarelsoftware implementation to reduce the processing time. As a result, the OPC Hillock defects is the most fatal defect of the inspection system was realized with high OPC, because it does not only degrade the print performance and flexibility. quality but also can cause the damages to other components. For the reason, it is important to detect the small hillock defects at the size of 0.1 1. The OPC and OPC defects mrn. The OPC's we are working on have three layers, i.e. UL, CGL, and CTL, on the metal base, as shown in Fig. 1. The defects in each layer have different characteristics in terms of size and category (Table. 1).