GEFRA GmbH has been developing and manufacturing the well known brand OPTISORT since more than 20 years. Most often, the successful fastener companies worldwide are using OPTISORT for quality control.

The high demands of the end customer make it neccessary to expand the possibilities of the inspection criteria. Today it is not enough to measure the parts and inspect the surface for scratches, coating defects and cracks.

The options which GEFRA is now off ering for the high demands include:
• LineScan for measuring the fl atness of stamping parts.
• Eddy current for checking hardness.
• SFS for inspecting smallest surface defects.

All these aditional functions can be added to the standard inspection system without loosing capacity and with the same easy handling that the customer has used with the AutoControl software.

During optical inspection, the yes/no control for hardness will be done with a coin for stamping parts. The structure of the parts will be continuously inspected with eight frequenses at up to 500 ppm. And the calibration is easy and user friendly.

Shape from Shading “SFS”
In the shape-from-shading method, four grey value images of a surface are taken with illumination from various directions in space. Using the diff erences in the grey values, images of the surface are calculated, which refl ect the spatial structure as well as texture. However, with the shape-fromby shading process, you do not receive any explicit height values, but only information regarding incline and curvature of the surface. For his reason, this technique is quite suitable for surface inspection.

The big advantage of shape-from-shading is in the fact that with highly refl ective surfaces, topology features can be clearly separated from texture (brightness) characteristics, and high-resolution intensity images can be created.