Automated identification of shoe upper components

The ultimate application had not been fixed when the project started, but it was considered likely the vision would be used to sort shapes from a random selection into kits for producing batches of, say, two dozen pairs of shoes. For use in control of subsequent processes such as automatic stitchmarking, the vision must determine the position of each point in a shape to within one hundredth of one inch. This requires that orientation be measured to 0.07 degrees. A research project aimed at producing instrumentation with vision capability meeting the above requirements was started with one of the authors (LNW) at City University in London in 1978, and has since been extended at BUSM´s Research Department and at the Universities of Durham and Hull. The paper is concerned solely with the image identification and positioning aspects of the work