In today’s manufacturing environment, automatic vision inspection has been widely applied in many different industries including semiconductor, electronics, food and beverage, pharmaceutical packaging, automotive, and many others.

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.

Lighting and lighting control is a critical component of any machine vision system since it has a massive influence on the signal to noise ratio and contrast in the images acquired.

The robotics industry is not slowing down. Last year the robotics industry shipped more robots to North America than ever before. And companies today are figuring out that they can utilize machine vision and robotics in many new applications.

The cameras, lenses and illumination used in a machine vision system all make significant contributions to the overall quality of the images that are produced. The rapid developments in CMOS image sensor technology over the last few years have created significant challenges for lens manufacturers. 

Lighting selection and setup play a critical role in the success of a machine vision application. Vision systems rely on specific types of lighting to optimize contrast or to highlight a specific feature of interest. 

The L.S. Starrett Company has introduced its AV450 Automatic Vision System. Versatile, accurate, fast, and American made, the new 3-axis vision system allows users to cost-effectively achieve high throughput in their inspection process, and is ideal for both repetitive, larger part-run applications and routine quality assurance.

The L.S. Starrett Company has introduced its AV450 Automatic Vision System. Versatile, accurate, fast, and American made, the new 3-axis vision system allows users to cost-effectively achieve high throughput in their inspection process, and is ideal for both repetitive, larger part-run applications and routine quality assurance.

Rapidly evolving, high-quality imaging technology is ushering in a new world of vision guided robotics (VGR) for manufacturers in diverse industries. 

Vision systems provide peace of mind when it comes to production quality but they can also generate valuable data that tracks process variability. Diving into the world of vision data can seem overwhelming, but with the right tips and tricks you can set up a system to work for you.