Abstract
This Paper proposes the tire mold number identification method which reads the letters on a tire surface with 3D. It is very difficult to separate the letters from the background of an image since the letters on a tire surface is an embossed data. There was many studies to read the letters on a tire surface for the factory automation, however, it was very difficult to separate the letters from the background of an image since the letters on a tire surface is embossed black characters on the black ground. In this study, we first developed the method to find the location of tire mold number, which is used to classify the tire size, from the embossed letters on a tire surface using 3-dimensional laser profile camera which is not affected by the lighting condition, then developed the method to separate the mold number from that location. As a result, we were able to contribute to automate the tire size classification which has been manually performed by operators previously.