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Industrial Optical Character Recognition System in Printing Quality Control of Hot-Rolled Coils Identification

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Abstract

This work presents a system designed to detect printing errors and misidentifications on steel coils that could lead to tracking problems and even guide to the delivery of the wrong product to the final client. An optical character recognition system is proposed to extract the printed identification of steel coils from images captured by a fixed camera in an industrial environment. The method considers different digital image processing techniques to deal with the significant lighting and printing variation observed, followed by a segmentation process that extracts and aligns the characters originally printed in an arch form, ending with a classification routine based on a convolutional neural network. The proposed system presents an approach to treat lighting variations in images, covering low contrast, darker and brighter images. Experiment carried out on a data set with approximately 20,000 images achieved an accuracy higher than 98%, supporting the validity of the proposed method.

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Notes

  1. The code is available at https://github.com/thaiscaldeira/steel-coil-ocr

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank ArcelorMittal Tubarão for supporting and making available the images used in this work. Patrick Marques Ciarelli thanks the partial funding of his research work provided by CNPq (Grant 312032/2015-3).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil

    Thais Caldeira, Patrick Marques Ciarelli & Gentil Auer Neto

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  1. Thais Caldeira
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  2. Patrick Marques Ciarelli
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  3. Gentil Auer Neto
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Correspondence to Thais Caldeira or Patrick Marques Ciarelli.

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Caldeira, T., Ciarelli, P.M. & Neto, G.A. Industrial Optical Character Recognition System in Printing Quality Control of Hot-Rolled Coils Identification. J Control Autom Electr Syst 31, 108–118 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40313-019-00551-1

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