Real-Time Resistor Color Code Recognition using Image Processing in Mobile Devices

This paper proposes a real-time video analysis algorithm to read the resistance value of a resistor using a color recognition technique. To achieve this, firstly, a nonlinear filtering is applied to input video frame to smooth intensity variations and remove impulse noises. After that, a photometric invariants technique is employed to transfer the video frame from RGB color space to Hue-Saturation-Value (HSV) color space, which decreases sensitivity of the proposed method to illumination changes. Next, a region of interest is defined to automatically detect resistor's colors and then an Euclidean distance based clustering strategy is employed to recognize the color bars. The proposed method provides a wide range of color classification which includes twelve colors. In addition, it utilizes relatively low computational time which makes it suitable for real-time mobile video applications. The experiments are performed on a variety of test videos and results show that the proposed method has low error rate compared to the other resistor color code recognition mobile applications. © 2018 IEEE.