Cutting Edge Localisation in an Edge Profile Milling Head

Wear evaluation of cutting tools is a key issue for prolonging their lifetime and ensuring high quality of products. In this paper, we present a method for the effective localisation of cutting edges of inserts in digital images of an edge profile milling head. We introduce a new image data set of 144 images of an edge milling head that contains 30 inserts. We use a circular Hough transform to detect the screws that fasten the inserts. In a cropped area around a detected screw, we use Canny’s edge detection algorithm and Standard Hough Transform to localise line segments that characterise insert edges. We use this information and the geometry of the insert to identify which of these line segments is the cutting edge. The output of our algorithm is a set of quadrilateral regions around the identified cutting edges. These regions can then be used as input to other algorithms for the quality assessment of the cutting edges. Our results show that the proposed method is very effective for the localisation of the cutting edges of inserts in an edge profile milling machine.