A Preliminary Study for Identification of Additive Manufactured Objects with Transmitted Images

Additive manufacturing has the potential to become a standard method for manufacturing products, and product information is indispensable for the item distribution system. While most products are given barcodes to the exterior surfaces, research on embedding barcodes inside products is underway. This is because additive manufacturing makes it possible to carry out manufacturing and information adding at the same time, and embedding information inside does not impair the exterior appearance of the product. However, products that have not been embedded information can not be identified, and embedded information can not be rewritten later. In this study, we have developed a product identification system that does not require embedding barcodes inside. This system uses a transmission image of the product which contains information of each product such as different inner support structures and manufacturing errors. We have shown through experiments that if datasets of transmission images are available, objects can be identified with an accuracy of over 90%. This result suggests that our approach can be useful for identifying objects without embedded information.