And this is a 100 level class?

For my non-US readers, let me start with an explanation: Universities in the US rank their academic classes by three digit number where the leading digit signifies the difficulty of the class. Thus a 100 level class is generally taken by freshmen (first year students,) while a 500 level class is typically only encountered while studying for a Master’s degree. One consequence is that any introductory level is generally described as being “one-oh-one” as in Economics 101, or perhaps Machine Vision 101.

I start with this preamble because those of you who receive the print version of Quality Magazine, with the Vision & Sensors supplement will find, under the heading of “Machine Vision 101” in the May 2010 edition, an article titled, “Color Goes Mainstream.” (If you just use the web link you’ll notice the “101” subheading is absent.)

The article, penned by Henning Tiarks of Basler, provides a detailed discussion of the various flavors of color line scan, and in particular, addresses the challenges of aligning tri-linear color line scan cameras.

It’s a good article, and if you really need to acquire color line scan images, it should be required reading, but it is most definitely not 101 level. Line scan machine vision is complicated, and color line scan imaging is really complicated. Do not attempt this for your first machine vision project.