Automatic Pill Identification from Pillbox Images

There is a vital need for fast and accurate recognition of medicinal tablets and capsules. Efforts to date have centered on automatic segmentation, color and shape identification. Our system combines these with preprocessing before imprint recognition. Using the National Library of Medicine Pillbox database, regression analysis applied to automatic color and shape recognition allows for successful pill identification. Measured errors for the subtasks of segmentation and color recognition for this database are 1.9% and 2.2%, respectively. Imprint recognition with optical character recognition (OCR) is key to exact pill ID, but remains a challenging problem, therefore overall recognition accuracy is not yet known