Vision-Based Automatic Identification Tracking of Steel Products for Intelligent Steel Manufacturing

To achieve intelligent manufacturing in Industry 4.0 for steel industry, this paper considers a smart steel manufacturing framework, where an automatic identification tracking method for steel products is proposed. Automatically online tracking and identifying steel products on a production line is essential for intelligent manufacturing management since those products would be frequently moved and processed at different locations on the product flow. Current approaches usually rely on embedding or marking a series of characters (or identification codes) on the steel surface. However, steel-making process is usually conducted under a high temperature environment, making it difficult to well embed the identification codes with high quality and further automatically well recognize them online. To tackle the problem, this paper presents a novel vision-based automatic identification tracking framework without needing to embed any identification codes into the steel product. The key is to employ the essential identity of a steel product without any extrinsic information embedded, achieved by extracting visual features from the product. The presented preliminary results have verified the efficiency of the proposed method, which will be further improved in the future.