Recognition of Identifiers from Shipping Container Image by Using Fuzzy Binarization and ART2-based RBF Network

The automatic recognition of transport containers using image processing is very hard because of the irregular size and position of identifiers, diverse colors of background and identifiers, and the impaired shapes of identifiers caused by container damages and the bent surface of container, etc. We proposed and evaluated the novel recognition algorithm of container identifiers that overcomes effectively the hardness and recognizes identifiers from container images captured in the various environments. The proposed algorithm, first, extracts the area including only all identifiers from container images by using CANNY masking and bi-directional histogram method. The extracted identifier area is binarized by the fuzzy binarization method newly proposed in this paper and by applying contour tracking method to the binarized area, container identifiers which are targets of recognition are extracted. We proposed and applied the ART2-based RBF network for recognition of container identifiers. The results of experiment for performance evaluation on the real container images showed that the proposed algorithm has more improved performance in the extraction and recognition of container identifiers than the previous algorithms.