Machine vision system for ore sizing
Christopher L. Eichelberger, Steven M. Blair, Brij M. Khorana · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1991
A machine vision systelu has been developed to size and count ore as it passes down a conveyor belt. The imaging system consists of a line scan camera a zoom lens and a structured lighting arrangenient. The structured lighting produces a line of light which is projected onto the conveyor belt at an angle with respect to the caniera. When a piece of ore is present the line of light covering the piece is displaced out of the field of view of the camera. This method is used to overcome the poor contrast between the ore and the conveyor belt. Iniages are acquired using an iiaage processor which performs real-tiiae thresholding of the iraage before it is passed to a frame buffer. A coniputer progrant locates the ore pieces in the image and identifies the boundaries between those pieces which are touching. Chords corresponding to the approximate major and minor axes of each piece are calculated. Using these measurements the size distribution for a population of ore is determined. 1.