초록
In steel making production line, steel slabs are given a unique identification number. This identification number, Slab management number(SMN), gives information about the use of the slab. Identification of SMN has been done by humans for several years, but this is expensive and not accurate and it has been a heavy burden on the workers. Consequently, to improve efficiency, automatic recognition system is desirable. Generally, a recognition system consists of text localization, text extraction, character segmentation, and character recognition. For exact SMN identification, all the stage of the recognition system must be successful. In particular, the text localization is great important stage and difficult to process. However, because of many text-like patterns in a complex background and high fuzziness between the slab and background, directly extracting text region is difficult to process. If the slab region including SMN can be detected precisely, text localization algorithm will be able to be developed on the more simple method and the processing time of the overall recognition system will be reduced. This paper describes about the slab region localization using SIFT(Scale Invariant Feature Transform) features in the image. First, SIFT algorithm is applied the captured background and slab image, then features of two images are matched by Nearest Neighbor(NN) algorithm. However, correct matching rate can be low when two images are matched. Thus, to remove incorrect match between the features of two images, geometric locations of the matched two feature points are used. Finally, search rectangle method is performed in correct matching features, and then the top boundary and side boundaries of the slab region are determined. For this processes, we can reduce search region for extraction of SMN from the slab image. Most cases, to extract text region, search region is heuristically fixed [1][2]. However, the proposed algorithm is more analytic than other algorithms, because the search region is not fixed and the slab region is searched in the whole image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a good performance.
