A typical, host-centric nonwoven materials inspection system consists of CCD line-scan cameras, frame grabbers, dedicated image processors and a host computer.

These systems can provide 100% inspection but are expensive to acquire and install, hard to configure and use, difficult to scale and have a large footprint.

As an alternative we propose a distributed web inspection system comprised of multiple smart cameras linked to a host computer via Ethernet. Each smart camera incorporates image acquisition, hardware preprocessing, data analysis and communications into one compact package. This distributed processing approach leaves the host computer free to perform GUI and database management tasks

The potential advantages of such a smart camera-based system include enhanced ease-of-integration to factory environment, ease-of-install, ease-of-replacement, reduced system size, powerful system resolution scalability, simplified and robust single package solution, seamless multi-camera integration and ability to handle high defect rates without degradation of system performance.