Commercial databases containing images of tire tread patterns are currently used by product designers, forensic specialists and product application personnel to identify whether a given tread pattern matches an existing tire. Currently, this pattern matching process is almost entirely manual, requiring visual searches of extensive libraries of tire tread patterns. This work explores a first step toward automating this pattern matching process by building on feature analysis techniques from computer vision and image processing to develop a new method for extracting and classifying features from tire tread patterns and automatically locating candidate matches from a database of existing tread pattern images. The method begins with a selection of tire tread images obtained from multiple sources which are pre-processed and normalized using tow-dimensional Fast Fourier Transforms (2D-FFT). The results of this reprocessing are feature-rich images that are further analyzed using feature extraction algorithms drawn from research in computer vision. A new, feature extraction algorithm is developed based on the geometry of the 2D-FFT images of the tire. The resulting FFT-based analysis allows independent classification of the tire images along two dimensions, specifically by separating 'rib' and 'lug' features of the tread pattern. Dimensionality of (0,0) indicates a smooth treaded tire with no pattern; dimensionality of (1,0) and (0,1) are purely rib and lug tires; and dimensionality of (1,1) is an all-season pattern. This analysis technique allows a candidate tire to be classified according to the features of its tread pattern, and other tires with similar features and tread pattern classifications can be automatically retrieved from the database.
Pattern recognition for classification and matching of car tires
Mustererkennung zur Klassifizierung und zum Abgleich von Reifen
2005
16 Seiten, 8 Bilder, 13 Quellen
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Englisch
Pattern Recognition for Classification and Matching of Car Tires
Online Contents | 2005
|Recognition of Raised Characters for Rubber Tires Classification
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1992
|Pattern Recognition using Exact Shape Matching
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1999
|Kraftfahrwesen | 1999
|