Towel mark recognition system for washing cloth handling system

Flexible objects such as clothes are hard to be handled by robots. But the working conditions for laundry factories are severe because of dusts, heats and steams, and full automation systems which can handle clothes are highly required. To automate these factories, a cloth handling robot system has been developed. It can handle face towels and hand towels, successfully. But to handle the towels including bath towels, it is required to recognize the marks on them. The marks on bath towels are weaved in cloth. The image of the towel marks contains many texture noises, and it is hard to recognize the mark in many textures. Here, to recognize the marks, the inclined lighting system and the recognition method using HOG features have been introduced. The HOG feature space distances make robust recognition of marks on cloth textures. The system have embedded to the cloth handling system and proved its efficiency.