METHOD OF AUTOMATICALLY REPAIRING CRACKS AND APPARATUS FOR USE IN SUCH METHOD

A method and apparatus automatically repairs cracks produced in a member to be repaired. A wide field image is obtained by photographing the whole surface of a blade 31 or the like in a wide field view by a remote camera 11 and the position of cracks on the surface of the blade is obtained as a rough position information of the cracks by processing the image of wide field view. Then the cracks are photographed in a narrow field view at the predetermined spacing along the cracks based on the rough position information by a light section method. The narrow field images are processed to obtain the position, width, and depth of the crack at each predetermined spacing, which compose crack data at the series of points, and the cracks are repaired based on the crack data at the series of points.