A New Software Application for Footwear Industry

Today, the footwear industry is facing many challenges. First, consumers demand for new products with better comfort and design; second, competition is becoming stronger in current global market. Due to these factors, flexibility and rapidity in developing new products are key factors for the medium and long-term survival and success of the footwear industry. This paper proposes a new software application based in simple image processing techniques for optimization of two important steps of the processes involved in footwear manufacturing: the shoe sole halogenation and lead roughing process. The application presented in this paper has a friendly interface where the sole contour points for shoe sole halogenation and lead roughing are automatically determined. The operator can easily change and set new points to improve details within the interest region where tools will be applied, when the halogenation or the roughing process is executed. Another feature of this application is the automatic transformation of the 2D coordinates of the dominant points to 3D real world coordinates. This feature simplifies further ongoing work - automatic code generation for different industrial robots to execute the halogenation and roughing processes.