Development of a Marking Character Reader for specific problems in Production Lines

A marking character reader is needed for automatic logistics with marking characters in steel plants. It is difficult to read marking characters automatically, because there are distortion of the character's shape, positional variation of marking characters, and disturbance factors on a production line. A marking character reader was introduced into production lines by using developed utilization methods, such as a character extraction method for positional variation of painted characters, the angle correction method with a particular character, and evaluation method of difference of character shape to choose legible character shapes. It was confirmed that the recognition rate of the developed reader is 95.6% per one billet. A developed reader has been working on production lines since April 2006.