Zebra Technologies Corporation
Method, system and apparatus for shelf edge detection

Abstract:

A method of detecting an edge of a support surface in an imaging controller includes: obtaining image data captured by an image sensor and a plurality of depth measurements captured by a depth sensor, the image data and the plurality of depth measurements corresponding to an area containing the support surface; detecting preliminary edges in the image data; applying a Hough transform to the preliminary edges to determine Hough lines representing candidate edges of the support surface; segmenting the plurality of depth measurements to assign classes to each pixel, each class defined by one of a plurality of seed pixels, wherein the plurality of seed pixels are identified from the depth measurements based on the Hough lines; and detecting the edge of the support surface by selecting a class of pixels and applying a line-fitting model to the selected class to obtain an estimated edge of the support surface.