Abstract
Commercial databases containing images of tire tread patterns are currently used by product designers, forensic specialists and product application personnel to identify whether a given tread pattern matches an existing tire. Currently, this pattern matching process is almost entirely manual, requiring visual searches of extensive libraries of tire tread patterns. Our work explores a first step toward automating this pattern matching process by building on feature analysis techniques from computer vision and image processing to develop a new method for extracting and classifying features from tire tread patterns and automatically locating candidate matches from a database of existing tread pattern images.
Our method begins with a selection of tire tread images obtained from multiple sources (including manufacturers' literature, Web site images, and Tire Guides, Inc.), which are preprocessed and normalized using Two-Dimensional Fast Fourier Transforms (2D-FFT). The results of this preprocessing are feature-rich images that are further analyzed using feature extraction algorithms drawn from research in computer vision. A new, feature extraction algorithm is developed based on the geometry of the 2D-FFT images of the tire.
The resulting FFT-based analysis allows independent classification of the tire images along two dimensions, specifically by separating “rib” and “lug” features of the tread pattern. Dimensionality of (0,0) indicates a smooth treaded tire with no pattern; dimensionality of (1,0) and (0,1) are purely rib and lug tires; and dimensionality of (1,1) is an all-season pattern. This analysis technique allows a candidate tire to be classified according to the features of its tread pattern, and other tires with similar features and tread pattern classifications can be automatically retrieved from the database.
