Abstract:A billet is dispatched from the inventory to the bench by a crane and then from the bench to the front of the furnace through a track. In the past, the billet was pushed onto the track by the manual control of machinery. The automation of this process requires knowledge of the real-time position distribution of billets on the bench for automatic control of the pusher. In this study, the real-time positioning of billets on the bench is achieved by the machine vision method. Specifically, with the U-Net as the basic network, the residual blocks in classic ResNet are used to achieve the accurate segmentation of transverse positions of billets. The experimental results and field application tests indicate that the segmentation accuracy of this method can meet the control requirements of industrial fields.