| 摘要 |
A refrigerator (2) includes a sensing system for detecting multiple physical characteristics of ice cubes in an ice cube storage bin (40). The system includes a digital image capture device (47) coupled to a digital image analyzing system (50) which captures digital images of the ice cube storage bin intermittently and compares the images to detect the presence of ice clumps. In addition, the digital image analyzing system evaluates the edges, ice size and/or image intensity of the ice cubes in the images in order to determine the presence of stale ice. An algorithm is utilized to estimate the volume of ice within the bin (40) based on the number of pixels in an ice bin image, the number of pixels of the ice within the bin, and a known volume of the ice bin. Notifications for clumped ice, stale ice and ice volume within the bin are sent to a user interface. |
