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A new approach for pin detection in a reconfigurable platform for electronic system prototyping is proposed. It makes use of image processing techniques to first, extract pin core regions by a two-pass process: a top-down multi-level erosion process to remove touching parts of pin regions, followed by a bottom-up pin core recovery process to recover core regions removed by the first process. Once all pin cores have been isolated, regions associated to every pin can be determined by a simple segmentation procedure based on the shortest distance principle. The proposed approach has successfully extracted the pin maps from many circuit footprint images, even in cases of touching pin regions. The results produced by the proposed method have also been compared with those obtained from the reference Watershed algorithm and this shows that our approach provides better results in terms of pin recovery and pin positioning accuracy for the type of images produced by our electronic prototyping system.

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