Visual inspection is a common method of

quality control Quality control (QC) is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. ISO 9000 defines quality control as "a part of quality management focused on fulfilling quality requirements". This approach place ...

data acquisition Data acquisition is the process of sampling signals that measure real-world physical conditions and converting the resulting samples into digital numeric values that can be manipulated by a computer. Data acquisition systems, abbreviated by the acro ...

, and

data analysis Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, enc ...

. Visual Inspection, used in maintenance of facilities, mean inspection of equipment and structures using either or all of raw human senses such as vision, hearing, touch and smell and/or any non-specialized inspection equipment. Inspections requiring Ultrasonic, X-Ray equipment, Infra-red, etc. are not typically regarded as Visual Inspection as these Inspection methodologies require specialized equipment, training and certification.

Quality control

A study of the visual inspection of small

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

s found that the modal duration of eye fixations of trained inspectors was about 200 ms. The most accurate inspectors made the fewest eye fixations and were the fastest. When the same chip was judged more than once by an individual inspector the consistency of judgment was very high whereas the consistency between inspectors was somewhat less. Variation by a factor of six in inspection speed led to variation of less than a factor of two in inspection accuracy. Visual inspection had a false positive rate of 2% and a false negative rate of 23%.

Humorous terminology

To do an eyeball search is to look for something specific in a mass of

code In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communicati ...

or data with one's own eyes, as opposed to using some sort of pattern matching software like

grep grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command ''g/re/p'' (''globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines''), which has the sa ...

or any other automated search tool. Also known as vgrep or ogrep, i.e., "visual/optical grep", and in the IBM mainframe world as IEBIBALL. The most important application of eyeball search / vgrep in

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

is vdiff. In various disciplines it is also called the "eyeball technique" or "eyeball method" (of data assessment). "Eyeballing" is the most common and readily available method of initial data assessment. Experts in pattern recognition maintain that the "eyeball" technique is still the most effective procedure for searching arbitrary, possibly unknown structures in data. In the military, applying this sort of search to real-world terrain is often referred to as "using the Mark I Eyeball" device (pronounced as Mark One Eyeball), the U.S. military adopting it in 1950s."Contemporary Geodesy" (Proceedings of a Conference Held at the Harvard College Observatory - Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, MA, December 1–2, 1958)
P. 68
says: "Now the first type of optical tracking, the most elementary, is that using merely the naked eye — as I heard a Navy man say the other day, 'Mark I eyeball' ". The term is an allusion on military nomenclature, "Mark I" being the first version of a military vehicle or weapon.

References

{{reflist Quality control Data analysis Vision Computer humor Computer jargon Military humor Nondestructive testing

Quality control

Humorous terminology

See also

References