Visible and infrared subsystems combine to enable cost-efficient wide-area surveillance.
Vendors employ off-the-shelf and custom CMOS area-array imagers to pioneer new designs for wide-ranging imaging applications.
Given the relatively slow movement of manufacturing technology, machine-vision technologies and products sometimes seem to evolve very slowly—never making the dazzling technical leaps seen in related fields such as integrated circuits, data storage, or telecommunications. But in fact, below the surface, the technology has steadily advanced.
An augmented reality system to assist technicians with problems in the field or factory has been developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics. The system allows technicians to image malfunctioning equipment with a camera affixed to the back of a laptop display.
US Department of Defense (DoD) designers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) want more capability from their systems in terms of video processing, high-definition infrared imagery, storage, and image processing—and they want the processing to occur before it is downlinked. Ground control stations will be adding more capability as well.
Researchers at Cornell University have developed a chip-scale (<1 mm2) sensor, the Planar Fourier Capture Array (PFCA), capable of imaging the far field without any off-chip optics. The PFCA consists of an array of angle-sensitive pixels (ASPs) manufactured in a standard semiconductor process.
At the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, Dr. Michael Levin and his colleagues are using quantitative automated behavioral analysis techniques to study living animals.
According to Techno Systems Research, the percentage of integrated vehicle cameras using CMOS sensors is projected to increase from around 20% in 2008 to more than 70% in 2013.
In automobile manufacturing, it is essential to inspect whether parts such as plugs, rivets, and screws are correctly placed on the car chassis and body as the car moves along the production line. Stefan Gehlen, managing director of VMT Bildverarbeitungssysteme, and his colleagues have developed a number of machine-vision systems to accomplish these tasks.
Solar cell inspection systems often require numerous features to be measured simultaneously using single cameras. At Owens Design, a solar cell inspection system has recently been developed to check part distance measurements and their orientation, features, and blemishes.
In older systems, better lenses may deliver a clearer image, but sometimes defects are best left unseen.
