Small Parts Counting

[EPlante]

Hello,
I have an application where I need to count small parts (tiny nuts and bolts) quickly for packaging. Traditional object sensing does not work due to the size of the parts so I am looking into vision methods. It will only be 1 type of part at a time and I have complete control of the environment (lighting, background etc.). The plan is to use Arduino. I believe this will work but have 2 main concerns:

1.) Color detection. The nuts and bolts are either brass or steel. I am most worried about the gray color of the steel not contrasting or reflecting too much light.
2.) Multiple parts counted as one. It is possible that parts are touching each other. This may be solved by analyzing the object size?

Before moving on to testing I would like to get feedback from the community to verify this would work!

Thanks for the help!

[edge]

1.) Color detection. The nuts and bolts are either brass or steel. I am most worried about the gray color of the steel not contrasting or reflecting too much light.

I agree that gray will be a difficult color for Pixy to lock onto since it has no real hue. It may or may not work, it’s hard to say without having tried this.

2.) Multiple parts counted as one. It is possible that parts are touching each other. This may be solved by analyzing the object size?

Agreed that this might be a problem as well. Touching objects of the same color/hue get merged into 1 larger detected object. If the distance to the object is the same, the size can provide good hints as to whether a given detected object is multiple objects (or not).

Hope this helps!

Edward