1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical measurement system and a sample optical property management method, and is used in management of optical property values in manufacture of components, products, or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, various products, components, or the like are manufactured in various kinds of factories. These manufactured items are shipped after product inspection or delivery inspection. Then, when these items are received at a factory, a service office, or the like, acceptance inspection or receiving inspection is performed on these items. After that, the items are sent to an assembling process, or alternatively stored in a warehouse or the like.
In recent years, the importance of color management of products has been recognized especially in the fields of painting, forming, printing, textile, and the like. Thus, the optical property value of a product is measured often in an inspection process.
That is, in a manufacturing department or a quality control department, a spectro-colorimeter, a color difference meter, or a glossmeter is used so as to measure the optical property value such as color and gloss of a product. Then, on the basis of the measurement data obtained in this measurement, acceptance or rejection determination is performed in the product inspection.
In the color management in such product inspection, in many cases, a reference product is set up for each of various kinds of products. In this case, for each product, reference data of the reference product is recorded and stored in an inspection file. Then, in the inspection process, an inspector checks each product flowing down along the product line, and actually measures the optical property value of the product. Then, after finding out the reference data of the product from the file, the inspector compares the found out reference data with the measurement data, and thereby determines acceptance or rejection.
Further, as for the method of setting up the reference data, a method has been proposed that employs means for measuring the color value of a reference article by using a plurality of color sensors and then registering the colorimetry value as a reference color value and means for searching for already registered reference color data, so that the setting of the reference color data is performed using any one of the two kinds of means.
Conventionally, when the products flowing down along the line are of the same kind, or alternatively when only a few kinds of products flow down along the line, the reference data for these products can easily be acquired in advance, and hence the measurement data can easily be compared with the reference data so that their acceptance or rejection can easily be determined.
Nevertheless, generally, in a product line where a large number of kinds of products are treated, in many cases, a variety of products flow down irregularly in quantity and timing. Thus, in this case, much effort and time are necessary for finding out the reference data corresponding to each product flowing down, from among a large volume of the reference data. This reduces significantly the working efficiency.
Further, in some cases, even the same kind of products have a difference in the allowable color variance depending on the destination. In this case, the use of simple colorimetry data as reference data can be insufficient for determining acceptance or rejection.
Further, the products under the color evaluation have a large variety in the shape and the surface state, and hence the condition for measuring the colorimetry value also has a large variety. Thus, in some cases, the measurement need be performed under a product-proper measurement condition depending on the attribute of the product.
Such variety of measurement conditions includes: an observation field of view condition (a 2-degree field of view or a 10-degree field of view), an observation light source (light sources such as D65/A/C); the presence or absence of influence of regular reflected light (SCI/SCE); the evaluation of fluorescence color (the presence or absence of excitation light); the measurement portion of the product; and the number of times of measurement (one-time measurement or multiple time measurement).
Thus, in such color management, a large variety is present in the operation of setting and measurement, that is, in the setting of a measurement condition into the colorimeter, the operation of calibration, the setting of a measurement method, the setting of display contents, and the like. This has caused a problem that a mistake can occur in the operation.