Learning about machine vision

I received an email from Edmund Optics the other day – perhaps you did too – reminding me of their large library of Application Notes. It’s been a long time since I looked at the advice they offer, so I dived in to their website.

The issue I’ve always had with Edmund is that machine vision is but a small part of their business. Their customers and markets are more in the scientific imaging realm and I prefer to deal with people who understand machine vision applications inside out. But with that caveat, I have to say there’s some good stuff in their Technical Library.

I would suggest that anyone seeking to get a grounding in vision – like the engineer newly assigned to a “vision” project – start in the Application Notes area. There’s a pulldown menu for zeroing in on areas of interest. I suggest skipping the Optics section because it’s not much into machine vision optics, and instead going for Imaging. That has some good info on camera settings and configuration, a little on vision-related optics, and something I found really interesting: a machine vision application case study. If you’re just starting out I really recommend working through the example they give. (Yes it’s like math homework, but you decided to become an engineer so you can’t hate it that much.)