Vision Systems Resource Center

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Controls engineers need a variety of information on machine vision topics such as closed-loop vision systems and color sensing.

Machine vision systems are becoming a basic feedback sensor in many industrial applications, along with providing both online and offline inspection capability.

These machine vision systems vary from completely integrated, standalone vision sensors, to systems assembled by users, system integrators, and machine builders from components including cameras, frame grabbers, and computers.

Machine vision software allows users to customize application performance to their specific needs.

Machine vision systems often are built to support fast data handling protocols such as GigE, a gigabit Ethernet protocol for machine vision applications, and a serial Camera Link protocol. Timely news, back-to-basics primers, feature articles, technical white papers and descriptions of the latest products all provide valuable insights that can be used in designing and building machine controls.

Avoid a Pressing Problem
Aluminum Extruder Uses Smart Cameras to Prevent Machine Damage

Color Sensors Offer Reliable Check
Using Human Vision for Color Checking Is Unreliable. Machine Builders Now Use Modern Color Sensors That Are Economical and Reliable

RCAs: As Time Goes By
Enjoy Reading the Details of This Year's Winners, and Shoot the QR Code to See the Full Results from 2001 or Any of the Other 10 Years

StackLights Enhance Machine Image
Edwards Signaling Helps Machine Builders Meet High-Quality Machine-Status Needs With Its 200 Class Lineup of Stacklights

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White Papers: In Depth Research

Reducing the Risk, Cost and Frequency of Production Stoppages Using Network Redundancy
Author: Belden, Mike Miclot and John Mower
Posted: 10/29/2010
Insurance is everywhere in today's world: Car insurance, house insurance, life insurance-but what about your facility, the equipment inside, and, most important, your industrial network? What ensures that the lifeblood of your operation will continue to function if a failure occurs? Can you afford the risk-and the expense-of outages and the associated downtime they can create? Consider the cost of one production stoppage at your plant. How much effort is needed to recover and restart the process? How much product may be lost? How much downtime will be incurred, and how much will it cost per minute, per hour, per day?

Whether your facility is involved in discrete or process operations, ensuring that it runs uninterrupted is critical to your bottom line. One way to minimize the risk of unplanned outages and help reach the goal of continuous operation is to ensure that your communications keep flowing with a back-up, or redundant network.

How can redundancy help? Automation pervades most modern plant systems, and those systems are nearly always part of the network infrastructure. When a failure occurs, it happens most often within the network. Redundancy so often, then, can be the mechanism to respond and reduce the effects of these failures, making an investment in a redundant system money well spent. When applied to the communications infrastructure, redundancy not only minimizes the risk of outages and maximizes uptime, it provides the stable operational performance so critical to facilities in our current fragile economy.

Machine Vision Academy
Author: KEYENCE
Posted: 02/08/2010
Master the Latest Application Techniques

Are you interested in image processing (inspection using a camera)? Have you thought about automating the visual inspection conducted on your production line? Have you considered implementing a vision sensor, but have given up because it seemed too diffi cult to use? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this guide provides professional image processing solutions for factory automation.

Machine vision systems have the ability to capture and evaluate targets in two dimensions, making them very useful for automating inspections once done by the human eye.

A digital camera has almost the same structure as that of a conventional (analog) camera, but the difference is that a digital camera comes equipped with an image sensor called a CCD. The image sensor is similar to the film in a conventional camera and captures images as digital information, but how does it convert images into digital signals?

The CCD stands for a Charge Coupled Device, which is a semiconductor element that converts images into digital signals. It is approx. 1 cm in both height and width, and consists of small pixels aligned like a grid.

When taking a picture with a camera, the light reflected from the target is transmitted through the lens, forming an image on the CCD. When a pixel on the CCD receives the light, an electric charge corresponding to the light intensity is generated. The electric charge is converted into an electric signal to obtain the light intensity (concentration value) received by each pixel.

Video Analytics and Security
Author: Schneider Electric
Posted: 08/21/2009
Using video data to improve both safety and ROI.

Most companies are gathering trillions of bytes of data, day after day, at no small cost, and then doing very little with it. Worse still, the data often is not serving its primary function very cost-effectively.

The "culprit," so to speak, is video surveillance data, the information captured by the video cameras that are used throughout most modern facilities.

But the situation is changing rapidly, thanks to an application called Video Analytics. This white paper looks at the new software technology, and how it can be used to leverage video data for better security and business performance.

Using the NI 17xx Smart Camera Direct Drive Lighting Controller
Author: National Instruments
Posted: 02/08/2008
The use of proper lighting is often overlooked when designing a machine vision application.

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