A Multifunctional Imaging Technique for Machine Vision

CCS. The machine vision industry is a dynamic and continually evolving environment which embraces new techniques and new technologies to enhance the information that can be made available using imaging methods. It is well known that the wavelength and direction of machine vision illumination is critical in determining the information available in the image. How the light strikes the target determines how it will appear to the camera since the properties of the light allow different features to be highlighted. Computational Imaging (CI) makes use of this fact by using a multi-shot approach to acquire a sequence of images, each having different lighting or optical configurations. Data can be extracted from each image and combined to create an output image that contains details that are most relevant to the particular application. This is a versatile approach that, with an appropriate choice of lighting, optics and sequencing, can create many different imaging solutions by producing better images or images with unique characteristics. Typical examples include providing increased contrast, higher resolution color, multi-spectral features, extended depth of field, segmented 3D information, and combinational illumination.