Examine vision technology for small object recognition in an industrial robotics application

Abstract: This thesis explains the development of a computer vision system able to find and orient relatively small objects. The motivations is exchanging a monotonous work done by hand and replace it with an automation system with help of an ABB IRB 140 industrial robot. The vision system runs on a standard PC and is developed using the OpenCV environment, originally made by Intel in Russia. The algorithms of the system is written in C++ and the user interface in C++/CLI. With a derived test case, multiple vision algorithms is tested and evaluated for this kind of application. The result shows that SIFT/SURF works poorly with multiple instances of the search object and HAAR classifiers produces many false positives. Template matching with image moment calculation gave a satisfying result regarding multiple object in the scene and produces no false positives. Drawbacks of the selected algorithm developed where sensibility to light invariance and lack of performance in a skewed scene. The report also contains suggestions on how to precede with further improvements or research.