Upper automatic sewing technology based on image

The process of upper sewing is one of the most important steps in the whole shoemaking process, which affects the shoemaking scheme and the appearance of shoes directly. Aiming at improving the automatic level of the uppers sewing process, this paper presents a system which can convert the input of the image of uppers to the output of numerical control code for automatic upper sewing process. The system uses a CCD camera to get the image of uppers, and adopts existing image processing technology to carry out noise-removal processing, binarization processing, edge detection, edge thinning, and then the contour of the upper which contains the essential sewing geometric information is extracted from the image. Through vectorization, the contour is approximated to some line and arc segments that can be interpolated on general NC machines, and it is saved in the form of DXF file, finally, after postpositive processing such as path planning and offset calculation, NC code of the graphics is generated. A practical application of the system is given at the end of the paper.