Thursday, October 14, 2010

Agricultural machine vision keeps on growing

Time was, describing something as “agricultural” meant that it was rough and ready, perhaps even rather crude, but we all know machine vision is anything but. However, it’s role in agriculture seems to just keep on growing, as evidenced by “Machine Vision Saves Fruit, By Better Sizing And Sorting” (Control Engineering, October 5th, 2010.)

I thought this was a fascinating application case study, but what really caught my eye was the picture of the proprietary 2 sensor camera the equipment builder had integrated. This appears to be 2 CMOS sensors in a single housing, one viewing in the IR, the other using color. Perhaps you’re picturing something like the AD-080 from JAI, but no, that’s not what they’re using. What the picture shows is really two cameras, with two lenses, in a single box.

Now why wouldn’t they use the JAI camera for this?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Price ? The JAI's quite expensive. Resolution / speed / sensitivity (the JAI is 1/3" 1024 x 768 @ 30 fps, very low for the price)

Anonymous said...

The JAI AD-080 is less expensive than 2 single cameras of the same resolution, 2 sets of optics, 2 sets of cables and power supplies. It then has the advantages of having both sensors aligned within 1/4 pixel, without paralax issues, and robustness of the alignment, since there aren't 2 individually mounted cameras to become misaligned.

Since the prism in the camera is dividing the light spectrum in half (prism)and not splitting the total light in half to two sensors (beam splitter), sensitivity in each of the channels is approx. 90% of a single chip camera of same resolution. CCD sensors, not CMOS, are used due to their image quality and sensitivity benefits over CMOS.

SK
Sir Technical Pre-Sales, JAI Inc.