High Speed Sorting of Pennies by Type and Date
Sorts coins by solenoid on a conveyor by classifying images with Caffe & DIGITS
To understand where this system is heading in the short term see the 2nd Proof of Concept issues and the Prototype Coinsorter Issues
Check out the starting point issues to see what is currently being worked on.
The first version of this system used a C# project to capture images from a Canon Rebel camera and called MATLAB to preprocess them. A VB project was used to call DIGITS to classify the images and call a HP Power supply to drive a solenoid. These two projects have now been replaced.
The second verion is almost running. It uses C#, OpenCV, a webcam, Arduino solenoid control, and local classification with Caffe on Windows 10. Here is a poster that describes the 2nd version.
This group of programs and scripts is just a quick proof of concept to show physical coin sorting. It "was" sorting about 2 pennies a second, continuously. One solenoid and 2 physical bins are currently set up. Using Caffe it’s easy to distinguish between designs of coins. For example you can train a convolutional neural network (CNN, what Caffe uses) to determine if a coin image is heads vs tails or say recognize the state on a random US state quarter image. Using the "copper" image set out on GemHunt.com Caffe can tell heads vs tails between US copper pennies 99.9% of the time. This can be done using using DIGITS with default setting of AlexNet with no programming involved!
Click to watch a video of it in action:
View parts list and documentation for the conveyors and the CAD files.
For a long term project direction check out the issues for future milestones.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions about this project.
Thanks!
Paul Krush
1-630-830-6640