Machine vision prototyping tool

As you put together your system, one of the challenges is anticipating every possible environmental variation. You know that lighting will change, there could be vibration and everything will get dusty, but how do you ensure your application will continue to perform?

Well one way is to test it on a large set of doctored images. By “doctored” I mean start with a good image and use a package such as Photoshop to make subtle tweaks in brightness and contrast as well as adding in noise or blur. (Of course, as a good engineer, you’ll make controlled changes so you can actually quantify sensitivity to the various parameters you select.)

This is all well and good in theory, but time is money so the hours you spend developing that set of test images has to be paid for by the customer.

An alternative is to let your machine vision software do it for you. That’s the idea behind some of the new tools in the latest release of Vision Builder AI from National Instruments and as discussed by Kamalina Srikant in Advanced Imaging Magazine (January 4th, 2010)

I think it’s a great idea. Let me know if you’ve tried it.