Patent ID: 8180143
Filing Date: 2012-05-15
Classification: G01B,G01M

Abstract:
1. A gear inspection system, comprising: an assembled gearbox with an inspection port providing viewing of gears in said gearbox, wherein said gearbox is subject to speed or load testing providing a contact pattern on a gear tooth; an image acquisition unit oriented proximate said inspection port with an acceptable field of view of a section of the gears, wherein said image acquisition unit obtains a gear tooth image with a contact pattern image; and a processing unit with a computer readable medium storing a computer program, wherein the computer program determines boundaries of the contact pattern image by computing density profiles of intensity values across at least a section of the gear tooth image, wherein a point having a maximum gradient identifies an edge of the contact pattern and transforms the gear tooth image and contact pattern image to a model of said gear tooth and wherein the processing unit computes metrics to determine whether the gearbox is acceptable.