The coil recognition system for an unmanned crane using stereo vision

In steel works, there is a need to know where is a coil in a yard for an unmanned crane operation. Image based vision processing can be effective in detecting important geometrical features of an object and lead to accurate estimation of the object's position/orientation required for pickup operations such as a crane. In this paper, we investigate techniques for recognizing the coil's position/orientation with established a 3D map by stereo vision system which is implemented on FPGA chips and generates disparity values from stereo camera images at high speed. In order to recognize the coil's position/orientation, a surface segmentation technique is used. Our system is tested at coil yard in steel works for an unmanned crane.