Monday, June 29, 2009

NI – still committed to machine vision

I’ve always found Vision Builder a good product for desktop evaluation of images and rudimentary algorithm prototyping, so I’m looking forward to the next release. I anticipate the inclusion of a new function to help in testing algorithm robustness. More specifically, NI have taken on board a suggestion, made at a previous NI Week, that a large image set should be created artificially for offline robustness testing.

What this means is that the new release of VBAI will have tools to make subtle modifications to images, such as adding motion blur or changing scale. With this I can start with a small set of acquired images and turn them into a much larger set that reflect every condition my vision system might see in the real world. By running these through my prototype algorithm I can then quantify the level of false accepts and false rejects to be expected, and so identify where improvements are needed.

Or at least, that’s the theory. When I get my hands on the new release I’ll let you know if it really delivers.

1 comment:

Kyle said...

Hello B Grey.

At NIWeek 2009 in August, there is a session in the Vision Summit titled, "Design a Vision System You Can Trust" that details the image modeling capabilities in Vision Builder AI.

Here is the abstract:
Slight variations in lighting, camera position and a host of other system characteristics can have disaterous affects on the consistency of a machine vision system. This session will introduce new tools for dynamically modeling these environmental variations to boost the reliability and repeatability of your next vision application.

I hope to see you there!

Kyle Voosen