A Combinatorial Approach to Detection of Box Pallet Layouts

This paper presents an algorithm for detection and pose estimation of cardboard parcel boxes in depth images based on combinatorial enumeration. It is designed for sensor-driven manipulation of pallets consisting of stacked planar layers chiefly using 3D range measurements. The proposed method initially detects the planar top layer of the pallet and its polygonal contour, possibly containing holes. Then, it enumerates the hypotheses about the layout of the pallet layer and estimates the best matching configuration. Experiments on a real dataset assess the feasibility of the proposed approach.