Ben Dawson

Suppose you want a machine vision system to automatically detect scratches on a plastic part such as a cell phone case. You know that the scratches will be nearly straight lines and that they can be low contrast and discontinuous.

Smart, small and flexible—smart cameras combine a standard machine vision camera, programmable processing, communications and sometimes lighting, in a small enclosure.

Thickness is a measure of coatings or films, such as the thickness of paint on metal, or the distance between the closest opposing surfaces of an object.

Detecting product surface flaws—such as discolorations, burns, cracks, and scratches—is a difficult task for human or machine vision.

Morphology in its broadest definition is the study of shapes, and can apply to studying the shapes of animals or other organisms in biology, artifacts in archaeology or galaxies in astronomy.

Counting objects in an image seems like an easy task, which can be automated through machine vision and image analysis, but it becomes difficult when objects touch, move randomly, or are hard to distinguish from their background.