Depth-based feature extraction-guided automatic identification tracking of steel products for smart manufacturing in steel 4.0

To achieve smart manufacturing in Industry 4.0 for steel industry, a smart steel manufacturing framework is considered in this paper, where an automatic identification tracking method for steel products is developed. Existing approaches usually rely on marking or embedding a series of identification codes on the steel surfaces. However, steel-making is usually processed under a very high temperature environment, making it difficult to well embed the identification codes with acceptable quality for further online processing. Therefore, this paper presents a vision-based automatic identification tracking method without needing to embed any identification codes onto the steel product surfaces. The key is to use the essential identity of a steel product without extrinsic information embedded, achieved by extracting visual features from the steel image. Our preliminary results have verified the efficiency of the proposed method.