Vision Enhancement of Line Following Robot in Variable Lighting Environments

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Faculty of Engineering, October 6 University, Egypt

2 Faculty of Engineering at Shoubra , Benha University, Egypt

Abstract

Manufacturing applications for line following robots (LFRs) have gained increased importance in nowadays life, LFRs are to deliver mails within office buildings, carry children through shopping malls entertainment places and deliver medications in hospital. The vision system in all these applications is very sensitive to the exact color of the line which makes the line identification task harder than anticipated.
In this paper Image processing techniques are used to achieve qualitative navigation in different lighting environments. The proposed vision system is composed of several stages. Firstly, color constancy techniques are applied to the acquired RGB image taken via webcam to achieve color corrected image, independent of the color of the light source, the resulting color corrected image is then converted to HSI color coordinates to adapt to the lighting intensity changes. After that, the image is contrast enhanced to even out the illumination in the image. Then the image is filtered to eliminate the noise. Finally morphological operations are applied to account for any cutting in the line to be followed. The results are evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively to achieve vision enhancement of LFR 

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