A fast multi-view based specular removal approach for pill extraction

This paper presents a novel approach to remove the specular reflections on the transparent plastic medicine package and automatically extract the randomly distributed pills inside. In this approach, three cameras are employed to take images of the package from different viewpoints. And these three images are used as input image set while the output is a series of small images of a single pill. And these images can be directly applied to the traditional single pill recognition algorithms. The experimental results show the reliability of our approach by measuring correct detection rate (100%), false detection rate (0%) and pill separation accuracy (98.4%). And the proposed method processes a set of three 725×725 sized images at 0.15s averagely on a Core i5-2400 3.1GHz PC.

[1]  Stephen Lin,et al.  Multibaseline stereo in the presence of specular reflections , 2002, Object recognition supported by user interaction for service robots.

[2]  Narendra Ahuja,et al.  Real-Time Specular Highlight Removal Using Bilateral Filtering , 2010, ECCV.

[3]  Sei-ichiro Kamata,et al.  Color distribution matching using a weighted subspace descriptor , 2011, 2011 18th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.

[4]  Guojun Lu,et al.  Review of shape representation and description techniques , 2004, Pattern Recognit..

[5]  Katsushi Ikeuchi,et al.  Separating reflection components of textured surfaces using a single image , 2003, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[6]  Hui-Liang Shen,et al.  Simple and efficient method for specularity removal in an image. , 2009, Applied optics.

[7]  Anil K. Jain,et al.  PILL-ID: Matching and Retrieval of Drug Pill Imprint Images , 2010, 2010 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

[8]  Stephen Lin,et al.  Diffuse-Specular Separation and Depth Recovery from Image Sequences , 2002, ECCV.

[9]  Chengjie Wang,et al.  Removal of Transparent Plastic Film Specular Reflection Based on Multi-Light Sources , 2012, 2012 Symposium on Photonics and Optoelectronics.

[10]  Steven A. Shafer,et al.  Using color to separate reflection components , 1985 .

[11]  In-So Kweon,et al.  Correspondence Search in the Presence of Specular Highlights Using Specular-Free Two-Band Images , 2006, ACCV.

[12]  Ramesh Raskar,et al.  Specular reflection reduction with multi-flash imaging , 2004, Proceedings. 17th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing.

[13]  Ruigang Yang,et al.  A Uniform Framework for Estimating Illumination Chromaticity, Correspondence, and Specular Reflection , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[14]  Honggang Zhang,et al.  Chromaticity-based separation of reflection components in a single image , 2008, Pattern Recognit..