Identification and classification of materials using machine vision and machine learning in the context of industry 4.0

Manufacturing has experienced tremendous changes from industry 1.0 to industry 4.0 with the advancement of technology in fast-developing areas such as computing, image processing, automation, machine vision, machine learning along with big data and Internet of things. Machine tools in industry 4.0 shall have the ability to identify materials which they handle so that they can make and implement certain decisions on their own as needed. This paper aims to present a generalized methodology for automated material identification using machine vision and machine learning technologies to contribute to the cognitive abilities of machine tools as wells as material handling devices such as robots deployed in industry 4.0. A dataset of the surfaces of four materials (Aluminium, Copper, Medium density fibre board, and Mild steel) that need to be identified and classified is prepared and processed to extract red, green and blue color components of RGB color model. These color components are used as features while training the machine learning algorithm. Support vector machine is used as a classifier and other classification algorithms such as Decision trees, Random forests, Logistic regression, and k-Nearest Neighbor are also applied to the prepared data set. The capability of the proposed methodology to identify the different group of materials is verified with the images available in an open source database. The methodology presented has been validated by conducting four experiments for checking the classification accuracies of the classifier. Its robustness has also been checked for various camera orientations, illumination levels, and focal length of the lens. The results presented show that the proposed scheme can be implemented in an existing manufacturing setup without major modifications.