Control of postal parcels separation by artificial vision

A procedure for verifying the spacing of parcels in the mail sorting process has been developed. It is a multistep, silhouette-based method. It starts by digitizing grey-level images and ends with a decision as to whether parcels in the sorting area are improperly or properly spaced. This technique also locates and reads the address block on the parcels. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of this spacing verification scheme. It is noted that the approach is quite fast