Application of machine vision for performance enhancement of footing machine used in leather industry of Pakistan

The project replaces the existing solution employed in leather industry to measure the area of irregular pieces of leather. The designed machine uses camera to perform the task as compared to the photo sensors in the existing machine and as a result, the accuracy of the system has been increased. Also, the existing machine runs through a 486 PC with software written in Pascal and thus the maintenance of the machine is cumbersome as most of the cards for 486 PC are now obsolete. The designed machine is run through a Pentium processor with MATLAB program. The low level control of machine is performed by an inexpensive AT89C51 microcontroller which monitors the IR sensor for the detection of leather piece on machine base, drives the DC motor through a motor interfacing card and sends synchronizing signal to MATLAB for capturing the image of leather. Upon receiving the capture signal from microcontroller; image is captured and processed by MATLAB to calculate the area of leather piece.