Development of character recognition system for the billet images in the steel plant

In the steel production line, the molten metal of a furnace is transformed into billet and then moves to the heating furnace of the hot rolling mill. This paper describes about the realtime billet characters recognition system in the steel production line. Normally, the billets are mixed at yard so that their identifications are very difficult and very important processing. The character recognition algorithm used in this paper is base on the subspace method by K-L transformation. With this method, we need no special feature extraction steps, which are usually error prone. So the gray character images are directly used as input vectors of the classifier. To train the classifier, we have extracted eigen vectors of each character used in the billet numbers, which consists of 10 arabia numbers and 26 alphabet aharacters, which are gathered from billet images of the production line. We have developed billet characters recognition system using this algorithm and tested this system in the steel production line during the 8-days. The recognition rate of our system in the field test has turned out to be 94.1% (98.6% if the corrupted characters are excluded). In the results, we confirmed that our recognition system has a good performance in the poor environments and ill-conditioned marking system like as steel production plant.