Abstract
This paper proposes a new algorithm for detecting and recognizing overlapped objects among a stack of arbitrarily located objects using a signature representation scheme. The proposed algorithm consists of two processes of detecting overlap of objects and of determining the boundary between overlapping objects. To determine overlap of objects, in the first step, the edge image of object region is extracted and those areas in the object region are considered as the object areas if an area is surrounded by a closed edge. For each object, its signature image is constructed by measuring the distances of those edge points from the center of the object, along the angle axis, which are located at every angle with reference to the center of the object. When an object is not overlapped, its features which consist of the positions and angles of outstanding points in the signature are searched in the database to find its corresponding model. When an object is overlapped, its features are partially matched with those object models among which the best matching model is selected as the corresponding model. The boundary among the overlapping objects is determined by projecting the signature to the original image. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested with the task of picking the top or non-overlapped object from a stack of arbitrarily located objects. In the experiment, a recognition rate of 98% has been achieved.
