Abstract
Tool wear monitoring can be achieved by analyzing the texture of machined surfaces. In this paper, we present the connectivity oriented fast Hough transform, which easily detects all line segments in binary edge images of textures of machined surfaces. The features extracted from line segments are found to be highly correlated to the level of tool wear. A multilayer perceptron neural network is applied to estimate the flank wear in various machining processes. Our experiments show that this Hough transform based approach is effective in analyzing the quality of machined surfaces and could be used to monitor tool wear. A performance analysis of our Hough transform is also provided. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.