Plastic Material Classification using Neural Network based Audio Signal Analysis

Analyzing the acoustic response of products being struck is a potential method to detect material deviations or faults for automated quality control. To evaluate this, we implement a material detection system by equipping an air hockey table with two microphones and plastic pucks 3D printed using different materials. Using this setup, a dataset of the acoustic response of impacts on plastic materials was developed and published. A convolutional neural network trained on this data, achieved high classification accuracy even under noisy conditions demonstrating the potential of this approach.