ZHANG Yonglei,HU Tao,SHEN Liqun.Automatic alignment of container corner based on monocular vision[J].Optics and Precision Engineering,2025,33(19):3150-3161.
To enhance the efficiency of container loading and unloading and realize automated operations, this study investigates monocular-vision-based automatic alignment between spreader and container, integrating deep learning and image-processing techniques. Monocular images of container hoisting conditions were analyzed with emphasis on the regional characteristics of corner components. To address the low pixel proportion of corner regions in high-resolution images, a two-stage "coarse positioning-fine segmentation" strategy was proposed. Based on the segmentation results, key feature points were detected, 2D-3D point correspondences were established, and pose estimation was performed using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. Validation was conducted on an AUBO-i10 manipulator alignment platform in laboratory settings. Experimental results demonstrate that the mean average precision (mAP) for detection of container corner components exceeds 95% in both laboratory and real-scene environments. Mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) for corner segmentation reached 98.15% and 93.89%, respectively-improvements of 1.24% and 1.64% over the baseline SegFormer-B0-while model computational cost was reduced by approximately 23.2%. At a camera-to-corner distance of about 2 m, the aiming error of the alignment position was below 1.0 mm. Absolute translation errors on the
X
,
Y
, and
Z
axes were all below 5.0 mm, and absolute rotation error was below 0.5°. These results indicate that the proposed method achieves reliable accuracy and satisfies the requirements for automatic alignment of single-angle components.
Nantong Runbang Heavy Machinery Co. , Ltd. , Wuxi Kalman Navigation Technology Co. , Ltd . A container identification and positioning method combined with GPS\INS : 201910905943.1 [P]. 2023-02-21 . (in Chinese)
ZHANG L G , ZHANG W , LI Y C , et al . Acquisition method of container lock pin model based on point cloud data [C]. 2022 China Automation Congress (CAC). 25-27,2022 , Xiamen, China. IEEE , 2022 : 490 - 494 . doi: 10.1109/cac57257.2022.10055924 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/cac57257.2022.10055924
ZHOU T , ZHANG X X , LU H L , et al . CT and PET medical image fusion based on LL-GG-LG Net [J]. Opt. Precision Eng. , 2023 , 31 ( 20 ): 3050 - 3064 . (in Chinese) . doi: 10.37188/ope.20233120.3050 http://dx.doi.org/10.37188/ope.20233120.3050
WANG L , ZHANG X Y , SONG Z Y , et al . Multi-modal 3D object detection in autonomous driving: a survey and taxonomy [J]. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles , 2023 , 8 ( 7 ): 3781 - 3798 . doi: 10.1109/tiv.2023.3264658 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tiv.2023.3264658
JIANG ZH H , ZHANG M X , XUE W T , et al . Shape adaptive feature aggregation network for point cloud classification and segmentation [J]. Opt. Precision Eng. , 2025 , 33 ( 5 ): 777 - 788 . (in Chinese) . doi: 10.37188/ope.20253305.0777 http://dx.doi.org/10.37188/ope.20253305.0777
QI D L , HAN Y F , ZHOU Z Q , et al . Review of defect detection technology of power equipment based on video images [J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology , 2022 , 44 ( 11 ): 3709 - 3720 .
LIU Y Q , WU Y Q . Review of defect detection algorithms for solar cells based on machine vision [J]. Opt. Precision Eng. , 2024 , 32 ( 6 ): 868 - 900 . (in Chinese) . doi: 10.37188/ope.20243206.0868 http://dx.doi.org/10.37188/ope.20243206.0868
WEI L , LEE E . Real-time container shape and range recognition for implementation of container auto-landing system [J]. Journal of Korea Multimedia Society , 2009 , 12 : 794 - 803 .
TANG X . Research on Visual Alignment Technology of Spreader and Container Based on Deep Learning [D]. Chengdu : Southwest Jiaotong University , 2022 . (in Chinese)
ZHANG Y J , MI CH . A Fast Vision - based Algorithm for Automated Container Pose Measurement System [M]. The 8th International Conference on Advances in Construction Machinery and Vehicle Engineering . Singapore : Springer Nature Singapore , 2024 : 817 - 825 . doi: 10.1007/978-981-97-1876-4_64 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1876-4_64
LI Y X , GUO ZH F , YANG J L . Container lock hole recognition algorithm based on lightweight YOLOv5s [J]. Computer Science , 2024 , 51 ( S1 ): 524 - 529 . (in Chinese)
XIE E Z , WANG W H , YU ZH D , et al ., SegFormer: simple and efficient design for semantic segmentation with transformers [C]. 2021 : 35th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). December 6 -14, 2021, Canada.
LIU S T , HUANG D , WANG Y H . Receptive Field Block Net for Accurate and Fast Object Detection [M]. Computer Vision-ECCV 2018. Cham : Springer International Publishing , 2018 : 404 - 419 . doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-01252-6_24 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01252-6_24
ZHANG Y Y , ZHANG M H , ZANG Y X , et al . Efficient video deblurring guided byMotion magnitude and Convolutional block attention module [C]. Artificial Intelligence in China. Singapore : Springer , 2024 : 259 - 267 . doi: 10.1007/978-981-99-7545-7_27 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7545-7_27