This article proposes a new method for robust and accurate detection of the orientation and the location of an object on low-contrast surfaces in an industrial context. To be more efficient and effective, our method employs only artificial vision. Therefore, productivity is increased since it avoids the use of additional mechanical devices to ensure the accuracy of the system. The technical core is the treatment of straight line contours that occur in close neighbourhood to each other and with similar orientations. It is a particular problem in stacks of objects but can also occur in other applications. New techniques are introduced to ensure the robustness of the system and to tackle the problem of noise, such as an auto-threshold segmentation process, a new type of histogram and a robust regression method used to compute the result with a higher precision.

Probabilistic k-testable models (usually known as k-gram models in the case of strings) can be easily identified from samples and allow for smoothing techniques to deal with unseen events during pattern classification. In this paper, we introduce the family of stochastic k-testable tree languages and describe how these models can approximate any stochastic rational tree language. The model is applied to the task of learning a probabilistic k-testable model from a sample of parsed sentences. In particular, a parser for a natural language grammar that incorporates smoothing is shown.