Real-time detecting information marked on billets is important for automatically manufacturing and management in steelworks. But due to the tough production environments in steel enterprises, capturing and identifying characters marked on hot billets have many challenges. This paper presents a real-time image capturing and segmenting method with machine vision for characters marked on hot billets, and characters area is located based on color information of images. Furthermore, considering the marked characters are often slant, we proposed a kind of characters skew correction method to adjust the alignment of characters, and then segment characters into singles for recognition. Finally, with the proposed method, we have conducted some experiments in Baosteel Company. The result shows that our method can achieve 97% segmentation rate if we select proper image acquisition device and preprocessing algorithm. Additionally, it provides a new way for steel enterprise real-time capturing and segmenting marked characters image.

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