Intelligent vision in the nuclear industry

General Electric has developed an intelligent microprocessor-based machine vision system that is character font independent and is capable of reading characters that may be variably defined as a result of dirt, misalignment, or scratches incurred during processing. This system, the Alphavision System, was developed at the GE fuel fabrication facility in Wilmington, North Carolina, and has been used to read serial numbers on fuel rods. This paper describes the system and considerations for its use and suggests some potential applications in nuclear materials item accountability