Abstract
In a heated rolling process of a steel mill where steel plates are pressed to a sheet coil by spreading and expanding, an irregularly-shaped head portion as well as a tail portion of the sheet coil need to be cropped. Any crop which is not clearly cut and separated from the sheet coil may cause critical damages to the facilities of the following processes. As the cropping process is performed very fast, human eyes are not proper for continuous monitoring of the cropping process. To solve this problem, we have developed a machine-vision based crop-drop detection system. The system also measures lengths of major and minor axes for the crops and thereby determines the proper crop size to minimize steel sheet losses.