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.
In the past few years, once-novel GigE cameras have become fully integrated into factory networks, as illustrated by our cover story. Here, as editor Andy Wilson explains, large numbers of such cameras capture multiple images of plastic plugs used to seal more than 80 openings in automobile underbodies. Likewise, solar cell inspection has been enhanced by the use of a new generation of smart cameras, software, and lighting techniques.
New applications have also benefited from advances in machine-vision technology. These include transportation imaging, biomedical research, and border surveillance. Articles in this issue show how an electronic interface has been combined with a CMOS camera module for automotive applications and how researchers at Tufts University Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology have partnered with Boston Engineering to automate the study of worm behavior using four quadrants of LED lighting and a small embedded vision system.
Keep on rollin'
In the field of surveillance, visible and infrared systems are being combined to provide more information over wider areas. As contributing editor Winn Hardin shows, a camera system now under trial by the US Department of Homeland Security that includes a visible sensor subsystem mounted above an MWIR sensor system is being used to detect moving targets at the mouth to the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports.
Many of these advances have been made possible by developments in CMOS image sensor technology. Most of the advances were fostered by semiconductor companies targeting the consumer imaging markets, but a number have targeted the specialized markets served by machine vision. As Andy Wilson explains in his Product Focus, these often low-profile manufacturers are benefiting from the demand for new low-power, high-resolution, intelligent, or low-light/high-dynamic-range applications.
During the past decade the broad number of applications served by machine-vision and image-processing systems in the industrial, medical, security, or transportation markets has remained the same. However, the technology and product currents moving below them are quite turbulent.
W. Conard Holton, Editor in Chief
[email protected]
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