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AUTOMATED METHOD OF AND SYSTEM FOR DIMENSIONING OBJECTS TRANSPORTED THROUGH A WORK ENVIRONMENT USING CONTOUR TRACING, VERTICE DETECTION, CORNER POINT DETECTION, AND CORNER POINT REDUCTION METHODS ON TWO-DIMENSIONAL RANGE DATA MAPS CAPTURED BY AN AMPLITUDE MODULATED LASER SCANNING BEAM

  • US 6,705,526 B1
  • Filed: 09/21/2000
  • Issued: 03/16/2004
  • Est. Priority Date: 12/18/1995
  • Status: Expired due to Fees
First Claim
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1. An automated object dimensioning system for dimensioning an object, comprising:

  • a system housing having a light transmission aperture, supportable within a work environment;

    a laser beam production module disposed within said system housing, for generating an amplitude modulated laser beam;

    a scanning mechanism, mounted within said system housing, for projecting said amplitude modulated laser beam through said light transmission aperture, and repeatedly scanning said amplitude modulated laser beam across a laser scanning field and an object being transported through said laser scanning field within said work environment;

    a light collection mechanism, mounted within said system housing, for collecting laser light reflected off said scanned object and focusing said reflected laser light;

    a photodetector, mounted within said system housing, for detecting said focused laser light and producing an electrical signal corresponding thereto;

    a signal processor, disposed within said system housing, for processing said produced electrical signal and, during each scan of said amplitude modulated laser beam across said scanned object within said laser scanning field, generating a row of raw digital range data representative of the distance from said scanning mechanism to sampled points along said scanned object;

    a preprocessing data buffer, disposed within said system housing, for buffering rows of raw digital range data produced by said signal processor; and

    a programmed digital image processor, disposed within said system housing, for (1) receiving rows of raw digital range data from said preprocessing data buffer, (2) automatically processing said raw digital range data to produce a range data map representative of the object transported through and scanned within said laser scanning field, (3) buffering said range data map, (4) tracing contours within said buffered range data map, (5) detecting, from said traced contours, vertices associated with polygonal-shaped objects extracted from said range data map and corresponding to the scanned object, (6) detecting, from said vertices, a set of candidate corner points associated with the corners of the scanned object, (7) reducing said set of candidate corner points down to a set of corner points most likely to correspond to the corner points of a regular-shaped polygonal object corresponding to the scanned object, and (8) using said reduced set of corner points to compute dimension-related parameters of the scanned object.

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