Vision Systems Resource Center

• › Articles (118)
• › White Papers (36)
• › News (102)
• › Products (208)

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.

End Users' Needs Inspire Machine Builder's Inventions
Spartanics Celebrates 50 Years Providing Leading Solutions to Customers

Empower MRO in the Plant Thru Mobility and 3D Visualization
ControlDesign.com
Moderated Discussion Webcast on May 23 at 11 a.m. EDT
Gain real-time visibility into asset performance at reduced operating costs. This moderated discussion webcast from sister publication Plant Services teaches viewers how new innovations in mobility, 3D Visualization and analytics are empowering maintenance operations to be more mobile, visual and intelligent.

*Note: All webcast participants will receive a complimentary copy of the new Aberdeen Group Research Brief "Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) in Asset Intensive Industries."

Motion Simulation Software Boosts Profitability
AKE Robotics Sees Big Decrease in Time Needed to Design and Install Robotic Systems

Get Your Machine to a More Efficient Place
Take the Energy, Sustainability, Reliability or Performance Track to Get Where You Want to Go

More Articles »

White Papers: In Depth Research

Image Processing: Color Extraction
Author: Keyence
Posted: 05/14/2013
This white paper introduces the idea of image processing from the basics. The topic covered in this document is color extraction, which reduces the amount of data that must be processed. To achieve both high performance and speed, it is important to select the right method of extracting color information for the specific target.

Multiple Code Reading Applications Made Easy
Author: Cognex
Posted: 12/25/2012
Reading more than one barcode at a time is a challenging application for many manufacturing and material handling engineers. In these applications there is a need to read multiple codes of the same symbology, as well as multiple codes of mixed symbologies within one field of view (FOV). Even more difficult is reading one or more codes on multiple sides of a product to verify that the codes match or to output both sides' read results as one piece of data.

In this white paper, Cognex shares what it has learned in order to make these applications easy after solving so many variations. Cognex also points out typical multiple code reading applications.

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.

More White Papers »