Marking inspection device, marking inspection method and article inspection apparatus

A marking inspection method for inspecting a marking region including a marking part where a marking for specifying an article is made, out of a surface of the article, the method comprising:

• generating an image of an article having no marking and no defect as a reference image and storing the reference image in a reference image storage;
• obtaining an article image by imaging the article to be inspected;
• obtaining a marking region image by cutting out a part corresponding to the marking region from the article image;
• determining whether or not the marking is properly provided by performing character recognition of the marking part for the marking region image;
• and
• determining whether or not any defect is included in a marking peripheral part except the marking part, out of the marking region, by comparing a marking periphery image obtained by removing an image of the marking part from the marking region image to the reference image.

An article inspection apparatus for inspecting an article having a marking made on a part of a surface, comprising:

• a reference image storage that stores an image of an article having no marking and no defect as a reference image;
• an imager configured to image the article;
• at least one processing unit configured to
• obtain a marking region image by cutting out a part corresponding to a marking region including a marking part where the marking is made from an article image obtained by imaging the article to be inspected by the imager,
• determine whether or not the marking is properly provided by performing character recognition of the marking part for the marking region image,
• determine whether or not any defect is included in a marking peripheral part except the marking part, out of the marking region, by comparing a marking periphery image obtained by removing an image of the marking part from the marking region image to the reference image,
• obtain a non-marking region image corresponding to a non-marking region except the marking region, out of the article, and
• determine whether or not any defect is included in the non-marking region by comparing the non-marking region image and the reference image.