In the past, the amount of processing power necessary to perform color-based machine vision applications was often an insurmountable hurdle. Even when manufacturers did offer color vision, they would typically convert images to grayscale prior to analysis—a strategy that significantly reduces precision and fails to detect edges defined by similar colors.
Thanks to today’s much-improved processing power and advanced algorithms that speed up color processing, the number of possible colors rises to an astonishing 16.77 million (256 tones for each of RGB). Known as real color sensing, this powerful algorithmic technique makes machine vision capable of matching the sensitivity of human vision with a high level of speed and consistency. Combined with advanced lighting technology, it can dramatically improve quality and flexibility in manufacturing.