A New Contour-Based Approach to Object Recognition for Assembly Line Robots

A complete processing chain for visual object recognition is described in this paper. The system automatically detects individual objects on an assembly line, identifies their type, position, and orientation, and, thereby, forms the basis for automated object recognition and manipulation by single-arm robots. Two new ideas entered into the design of the recognition system. First we introduce a new fast and robust image segmentation algorithm that identifies objects in an unsupervised manner and describes them by a set of closed polygonal lines. Second we describe how to embed this object description into an object recognition process that classifies the objects by matching them to a given set of prototypes. Furthermore, the matching function allows us to determine the relative orientation and position of an object. Experimental results for a representative set of real-world tools demonstrate the quality and the practical applicability of our approach.