What do you get when you pair an industrial camera with an HDMI controller?
A University of Kentucky research team are calling their most recent machine vision innovation, a machine vision camera that incorporates an HDMI controller for interfacing directly to commodity projectors, BYOP, for “Bring Your Own Projector.”
The board is a traditional high-speed machine vision camera—a global-shutter sensor streaming full frames over USB 3.0—with a complete HDMI receiver and transmitter integrated alongside it on the same FPGA. Video from a host computer enters the camera and passes through to a projector. Because the camera sits in the video path rather than beside it, it knows precisely what is being projected, and when. Connect any HDMI projector and the system becomes a structured-light 3D scanner, with no external trigger box, frame grabber, or custom synchronization cabling. A PC is needed only to collect the resulting images.
The result is a compact platform that combines high-speed imaging, integrated pattern generation, projector independence, and multi-camera synchronization in a single system designed for advanced 3D measurement applications.
The reason this is important is because of access, says Dr. Daniel Lau, DataBeam Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UK and a VSD editorial advisory board member. Structured-light systems are conventionally built around dedicated projection light engines—metrology modules made in small volumes, at prices that dominate the cost of the instrument, which is cost prohibitive and has confined structured-light 3D scanning to those who can afford the light engine.
