Special effect finishes and other appearance-enhancing materials, long a staple in the automotive industry, are now making their way into everything from appliances and consumer electronics to toys, cosmetics, and containers for personal care products such as shampoo. This includes everything from aluminum flakes for a metallic look to highly advanced materials that include multi-color sparkles that change color and appearance based on lighting conditions and viewing angle.
These complex materials take the quality control challenge beyond simply measuring color to the inclusion of appearance characteristics that have been difficult to quantify in the past. These characteristics have traditionally been assessed with the exclusive use of visual evaluation by the human eye. While this is still an important element of any quality control process, it is subjective and leads to errors. A better approach would be to quantitatively assess a pass/fail status for products using a combination of instrumentation and image analysis techniques.