A Physics-aware and Cascaded Vision Framework for Sub-pixel Measurement of Packaging Codes

YAN Yuxin; LIN Sen; HUANG Lei

doi:10.19554/j.cnki.1001-3563.2026.15.023

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Packaging Engineering ›› 2026, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (15) : 224-231. DOI: 10.19554/j.cnki.1001-3563.2026.15.023

Automatic and Intelligent Technology

A Physics-aware and Cascaded Vision Framework for Sub-pixel Measurement of Packaging Codes

YAN Yuxin¹, LIN Sen^2,*, HUANG Lei²

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Abstract

The work aims to propose a high-precision sub-pixel measurement framework integrating physics-aware data generation with cascaded visual measurement to address sub-millimeter precision requirements for QR code die-cutting and printing errors in high-end packaging, and to mitigate the lack of model generalization caused by the scarcity of samples with highlight interference in industrial scenarios. A detection framework fusing physics-aware synthetic data with cascaded visual measurement was developed and a physics-aware sample synthetic mechenicam was designed based on the the Blinn-Phong illumination theory to simulate the highly reflective properties of complex packaging materials to enhance model feature extraction. Subsequently, a "coarse-to-fine" cascaded visual measurement model was deployed: with YOLO11-Seg used to extract target masks, followed by least-squares sub-pixel edge fitting and homography-guided perspective correction to eliminate discretization artifacts. Experiments demonstrated that the system achieved 98% bounding box accuracy, accurately localizing the target regions. The single-frame processing time was within 100 ms. In conclusion, by integrating semantic perception with geometric precision, the method restricts absolute measurement errors to 0.04 mm, operating well within the 0.8 mm tolerance requirement. It is applicable for quantifying micro-positioning deviations on complex optical surfaces, balancing robustness, interpretability, and on-site deployability.

Key words

machine vision / overprinting error / sub-pixel measurement / instance segmentation / YOLO

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YAN Yuxin, LIN Sen, HUANG Lei. A Physics-aware and Cascaded Vision Framework for Sub-pixel Measurement of Packaging Codes[J]. Packaging Engineering. 2026, 47(15): 224-231 https://doi.org/10.19554/j.cnki.1001-3563.2026.15.023

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