Just how does the clutch work?

When I was learning to drive a stick (‘manual transmission’, for all you European readers) I found mastering the clutch to be exceptionally difficult. Eventually my father found some diagrams (probably in a Haynes manual) that helped him explain what happened when I pushed down on the left-most pedal. Once I understood how the friction plate moved away from the flywheel it all made much more sense, and I have had no trouble in shifting up and down ever since.

If you have arrived at this page wanting to learn more about the clutch, let me refer you to these links:

• The basics of clutch operation
• What does a clutch do?

I believe machine vision is much the same. You don’t have to know how edge detection works to get a result from the tool, but if you do have an appreciation of what’s happening under the hood you’ll probably be a smarter and more skillful user.

With that in mind, I’m going to direct you to this blog posting by Jon Titus of Test & Measurement World. Jon is reviewing a book on vision algorithms – possibly a good cure for insomnia – that apparently provides a good explanation of how many tools actually work. I haven’t read the book myself, so I can’t comment on its usefulness, but in principal I do believe anyone working with machine vision is well advised to learn what’s actually going on at the pixel level.

A little knowledge can’t hurt, can it?