A Model-Based Vision System for Industrial Parts

A vision system has been developed which can determine the position and orientation of complex curved objects in gray-level noisy scenes. The system organizes and reduces the image data from a digitized picture to a compact representation having the appearance of a line drawing. This compact image representation can be used for forming a model under favorable viewing conditions or for locating a part under poor viewing conditions by a matching process that uses a previously formed model. Thus, models are formed automatically by having the program view the part under favorable lighting and background conditions. The compact image representation describes the boundaries of the part.