A fast multi-view based specular removal approach for pill extraction

This paper presents a novel approach to remove the specular reflections on the transparent plastic medicine package and automatically extract the randomly distributed pills inside. In this approach, three cameras are employed to take images of the package from different viewpoints. And these three images are used as input image set while the output is a series of small images of a single pill. And these images can be directly applied to the traditional single pill recognition algorithms. The experimental results show the reliability of our approach by measuring correct detection rate (100%), false detection rate (0%) and pill separation accuracy (98.4%). And the proposed method processes a set of three 725×725 sized images at 0.15s averagely on a Core i5-2400 3.1GHz PC.