A label placement method based on the enhanced Fruchterman–Reingold algorithm for industrial parts inspection

When inspecting industrial parts, the measurement results are displayed as labels to enable the operators to better understand and judge the measurement results. The use of industrial software for the automatic layout of measurement points labeling is a good way considering the layout efficiency. When there are numerous labels, the layout is prone to be unreasonable and with a decrease in layout efficiency, since it often encounters issues of labels overlapping and hence requiring manual adjustments. This paper proposes an automatic label placement method based on the circular pre-placement and an EFR (enhanced Fruchterman-Reingold) algorithm, which utilizes the balance of attraction and repulsion between labels for the automatic location adjustment. Case studies are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on automatic layout and preventing label region overlapping, which greatly saves the layout time from traditional manual adjustments.