HYPER: A New Approach for the Recognition and Positioning of Two-Dimensional Objects

A new method has been designed to identify and locate objects lying on a flat surface. The merit of the approach is to provide strong robustness to partial occlusions (due for instance to uneven lighting conditions, shadows, highlights, touching and overlapping objects) thanks to a local and compact description of the objects boundaries and to a new fast recognition method involving generation and recursive evaluation of hypotheses named HYPER (HY potheses Predicted and Evaluated Recursively). The method has been integrated within a vision system coupled to an indutrial robot arm, to provide automatic picking and repositioning of partially overlapping industrial parts.