Rapid automatic waveguide recognition using YOLO and OpenCV for 3D waveguide fabrication

Abstract

A 3D waveguide is attractive because it has the potential that the waveguides are arranged, not only in plane, into three-dimension. The mosquito method, in which the core and cladding material sources are liquid and will be cured using UV light, is known as one of the ways to fabricate the 3D waveguide. In this method, if multiple waveguides are fabricated, the time until UV cure is different between the first waveguide and the last one and it leads to core position shift because of gravity. To solve the problem, we considered reducing the time from the first waveguide formation to the UV cure using automatic waveguide fabrication with a camera. For the automatic waveguide fabrication, YOLO (you look only once) and OpenCV are exploited as machine learning and an image processor, respectively. As a result, a waveguide recognition time of 10 ms and image processing time of 50 ms, totally 60 ms, are realized.