An autonomous vision-based shelf-reader robot using faster R-CNN

The purpose of this study is to design, program and implement an intelligent robot for shelf-reading. an essential task in library maintenance is shelf-reading, which refers to the process of checking the disciplines of books based on their call numbers to ensure that they are correctly shelved. Shelf-reading is a routine yet challenging task for librarians, as it involves controlling call numbers on the scale of thousands of books promptly.

Leveraging the strength of autonomous robots in handling repetitive tasks, this paper introduces a novel vision-based shelf-reader robot, called \emph{Pars} and demonstrate its effectiveness in accomplishing shelf-reading tasks. Also, this paper proposes a novel supervised approach to power the vision system of \emph{Pars}, allowing it to handle motion blur on images captured while it moves. An approach based on Faster R-CNN is also incorporated into the vision system, allowing the robot to efficiently detect the region of interest for retrieving a book’s information.

This paper evaluated the robot’s performance in a library with $120,000 books and discovered problems such as missing and misplaced books. Besides, this paper introduces a new challenging data set of blurred barcodes free publicly available for similar research studies.

The robot is equipped with six parallel cameras, which enable it to check books and decide moving paths. Through its vision-based system, it is also capable of routing and tracking paths between bookcases in a library and it can also turn around bends. Moreover, \emph{Pars} addresses the blurred barcodes, which may appear because of its motion.