Multiple object detection for pick-and-place applications

This paper presents a novel approach for detecting multiple instances of the same object for pick-and-place automation. The working conditions are very challenging, with complex objects, arranged at random in the scene, and heavily occluded. This approach exploits SIFT to obtain a set of correspondences between the object model and the current image. In order to segment the multiple instances of the object, the correspondences are clustered among the objects using a voting scheme which determines the best estimate of the object's center through mean shift. This procedure is compared in terms of accuracy with existing homography-based solutions which make use of RANSAC to eliminate outliers in the homography estimation.