Patent ID: 8379081

Claim:
An appearance inspection apparatus comprising: an image capture unit that captures a picture of a TV camera as a digital image before and after the TV camera makes a relative scanning motion finer than pixels of the TV camera such that the TV camera moves relative to an inspection object; a camera motion measuring unit that measures the relative scanning motion of the TV camera in the images with precisions of sub-pixels smaller than a single pixel; a high definition image generating unit that generates a high definition image having a pixel resolution higher than that of the TV camera based on a plurality of the digital images captured by the image capture unit and scanning motion data on the TV camera measured by the camera motion measuring unit; and a recording unit that records and stores position information on the inspection object, wherein the high definition image generating unit calculates a relative position of the digital images in the high definition image by using the plurality of the digital images and the relative scanning motion of the TV camera, and estimates a brightness of each pixel of the high definition image by using each brightness of the digital images overlapping each other at each pixel of the high definition image.