Real-time Aspects of SOM-based Visual Surface Inspection

We have developed a self-organizing map (SOM) -based approach for training and classification in visual surface inspection applications. The approach combines the advantages of non-supervised and supervised training and offers an intuitive visual user interface. The training is less sensitive to human errors, since labeling of large amounts of individual training samples is not necessary. In the classification, the user interface allows on-line control of class boundaries. Earlier experiments show that our approach gives good results in wood inspection. In this paper, we evaluate its real time capability. When quite simple features are used, the bottleneck in real time inspection is the nearest SOM code vector search during the classification phase. In experiments, we compare acceleration techniques that are suitable for high dimensional nearest neighbor search typical for the method. We show that even simple acceleration techniques can improve the speed considerably, and the SOM approach can be used in real time with a standard PC.