A STUDY ON PERCEPTION METHOD OF THE MARKING LOCATION FOR AN AUTOMATION OF BILLET MARKING PROCESSES

The machine vision has been applied to a number of industrial applications for quality control and automations to improve the manufacturing processes. In this paper, the automation system using the machine vision is developed, which is applicable to the marking process in a steel production process line. The working environment is very harsh to workers so that the automatic system in the steel industry is required increasingly. The developed automatic marking system consists of several mechanical and electrical elements such as the laser position detecting sensor system for a structured laser beam which is projected to the billet in order to detect the geometry of the billet. An image processing algorithm has been developed to percept the two center positions of a camera and a billet, respectively, and to align two centers. A series of experiments has been conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results show that two centers of the camera and the billet could be detected very well and differences between two center positions could be also decreased via the proposed tracking algorithm.