Image processing of grinding wheel surface

Identifying the situation of grinding wheel wear and loading is a very important issue for high efficiency grinding operations. This paper presents a new method that detects and identifies the chip loading and cutting edge wear of a grinding wheel using the image processing toolbox of MATLAB. The different optical characters of the metal chips and the abrasive grains are analysed. The Sobel operator is adopted to make edge detection. A sensitivity threshold based on the global condition is used to decrease the noise. Image dilation and erosion processes are used to ensure the edge of each loaded chip is covered by a continuous section. The ratios of chips are calculated and displayed to monitor the wheel surface working status.