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Tool selection is a very important step in manufacturing processes so as to improve productivity with high quality. The contribution of this work is the development of a new method for automatic tool selection in computer numerical control lathe machines, based on image processing techniques and information of the boundary of the piece, provided by either a .DXF file (drawing exchange format) or from an image taken with other devices. The proposed method detects the preferential direction in the boundary of the piece and creates a directional field through a directional gradient aiming at selecting the correct tool. Results from experiments show that the method makes it possible to work with a resolution of 1.1 micrometers, and to obtain good performance in automatic tool selection when several types of two-dimensional parts in the image are processed.