• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.78-87
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• 1995

Specular reflection appears with metals, plastics, glasses and many other solid objects which are required to be inspected, assembled, moved, or processed automatically. Recongnizing such shiny objects with specular reflections is a hard problem for computer vision, since specular reflections appear, disappear, or change their shapes abruptly, due to tiny movements of the view. Traditionally, such specular reflections are discarded as annoying noise for recongnition purposes. In this paper a technique is represented for obtaining shapes of specular objects. The ring illumin- ation system employes a ring source which is positioned on the axis of the camera. The concept of the proposed method is that if specular objects are illuminated by the ring they show their own dis- tinctive specularity features in surface from which we can infer the shape of the object. A series of experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of this system.