Wood products automatic identification based on fingerprint method

This paper introduces utilization of improved fingerprint method based on wood surface visual parameters for increasing wooden products identifiability for instance in wood industry and especially for automation lines. Usually the traceability of the objects in the production chain is achieved by using identification code based systems, for example visual codes, which are marked in one position and are read by a machine vision system in another position. In many cases the possible maximum readability can be quite hard to achieve due to marking problems or code background visual problems. In wood industry traceability case it is possible to exploit the fact that wood is a biological material and therefore its surface is quite volatile, each code background is unique. The parameters describing the wood branches, grain or some other specific features can be used for matching for example the saw material in different production line positions. Presuming the conditions for the vision system in the consecutive positions are similar and no processing is applied to the traceable objects between those positions, then it is possible to match most of the objects and therefore increase automatic traceability and identification of the products in different positions of the production chain.