Research for enhanced counting algorithm of optical pill counting machine

광학센서를 이용한 알약계수기의 계수알고리즘 향상에 관한 연구

It is fundamental to count and pack the pills in the medicine manufacture field but those tasks are time and labor consuming. Thus, the need fur automation of those tasks is necessarily getting increased in order to get effective mass production. It Is significant to perceive pills quickly and precisely. There were many trials for this processing but the performance of the existing counting machines varies about size, shape and dispersion tendency of pills. In this paper, the authors try to improve the counting performance of a pill counting machine that has optical sensors with the neural network. The passing signal of pill is acquired with optical sensor and the passage signal of the pill is extracted as input patterns. The gradient and integration of signal during passing time and the time keeping the pill interrupt the light from the LED are used as characteristic feature. The back propagation and perception algorithm are used for training. Experimental results with several pills show that the designed algorithm is a little bit effective to reduce the noise effect which is generated from interference among the machine components and unreliable environment.