Abstract
This article proposes a method of locating and recognizing lockholes in shipping container corner castings. This method converts the original image of the containers captured by a camera into the HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) color space. To reduce the influence of the surface color of the containers and lights from the environment on the locating and recognizing algorithm, most noisy points of the image are filtered by binarization and a morphology opening operation to make the features of the containers clearer in the image. Thus, the container body can be separated from the total image. Then, the position and size of the corner castings are defined through calculation based on the international standard of the shipping container size. Lastly, by using this method, we can locate the corner casting in the image by using the General Hough Transform fitting algorithm onto ellipses.