Individual wood board tracing method using oriented fast and rotated brief method in the wood traceability system

Due to the economic, social, and legal requirements, individual wood identity recognition is a crucial technology required in traceability systems, such as the wood block chain system. Traditionally, labeling is a widely used technology which sticks a code label on the wood entity. It can be used to find out the information related to the entity from the traceability system by scanning the code labels. However, many kinds of labels are easily switched and falsified in illegal activities. This study proposed a new security label method that extracts the innate feature as wood fingerprint to prevent the label falsify problem. This method acquired the cross-section image of log or wood board and extracted the oriented fast and rotated brief (ORB) features to identify the individual entities. It is safe because the feature of the wood texture is innate and cannot be transferred from one to another. Furthermore, this features is unique because of the anisotropy of wood. An image acquisition method was presented. A position was marked as the fingerprint area at the cross section of the wood board, and the image of the fingerprint area was acquired by using a camera with a 20× magnifying glass. The individual wood board tracking method based on the ORB was employed to identify the wood entity. The key point set was described by a invariant rotation descriptor, and it can be used as a fingerprint to recognize the wood board by comparing the marked area images in the wood traceability system. In the experiments, 80 woodblocks were chosen as the tracer objects, and 10 places were marked at each cross section of the board. The results showed that this method has high recognition accuracy and robustness. The recognition accuracy reached 100%, and this method still retained high accuracy even when different cameras were used in different environments to acquire the images. This method can be used in the timber trade to trace wood boards or logs and to prevent illegal trading.