This week is taking on a bit of a National Instruments theme, but I don’t think the guys in Austin will mind too much. I finally got around to spending some quality time with Vision Builder AI 3.5, so today’s homily is on what I found.
First, let me say that I’m moving up from version 2.6. I liked the old version, but at times it was a bit unfriendly, so I’m glad to see that 3.5 is much improved. NI have made much of the ‘State Machine’ functionality, but for me that’s less important that the simple addition of a number of tools.
If you’re at all familiar with the earlier versions of VBAI you’ll know that to perform an image processing operation such as thresholding you had to drop out to Vision Assistant. Not a big deal, I know, but somewhat inelegant. Well now filters and thresholding are available directly from the tools menu, so that’s an improvement. Other changes I spotted (and I don’t claim to have logged them all,) are an “advanced” edge tool, the inclusion of a “golden template” tool and the addition of a QR code reader. The range of I/O functions has also grown, as has the ‘other tools’ section with the inclusion of custom overlay and logical operator functions, to name just a few.
So all-in-all, 3.5 is a significance advance over 2.6, but in the interests of being evenhanded, I feel I should also flag a reservation. There are now quite a few pattern matching-type tools available (like the golden template tool I mentioned earlier.) I’m not sure this is a good thing. Pattern matching is computationally intensive, meaning that your inspections are going to run slowly and this could be a problem if you plan to run an inspection on the Compact Vision System. But more fundamentally, pattern matching is an easy tool for the inexperienced user to grab a hold of. In fact I think it’s too easy – a sledgehammer to crack a nut, in many cases – and having tools of this power available encourages a developer to take the quick route rather than the best route.
Is that a bad thing? I’d love to hear your comments.
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You're definitely right about pattern matching. I work in applications for Soliton Technologies in Bangalore, and I can't get over how pattern match algorithms are affecting the general industry sentiment towards machine vision. Ease of use is obviously desired, but some people take a failure of a pattern match approach to mean that the problem is unsolvable using vision.
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