Software helps program cameras in a smarter fashion

This month, at the VISION 2011 show in Stuttart Germany, engineers from Vision Components (Ettlingen, Germany) described three new means by which software developers can program the company's smart cameras.

First, the company announced that all its machine-vision libraries have now been revised to run on PCs. Customers can continue to program their cameras using C or C++ but can now use the Microsoft development environment Visual Studio 2010 as well.

Second, Vision Components subsidiary Notavis (Ettlingen, Germany) has also developed a machine vision script language and a script interpreter called MVNova that includes all optimized C functions of the company’s libraries and an integrated web server that makes intelligent cameras browser-compatible.

Last, VC's partner EVT (Eye Vision Technology; Karlsruhe, Germany) can provide tools allow developers to create vision systems applications with no programming skills. The EyeVision software, which runs on Windows platforms, allows users to solve image-processing tasks through a "drag and drop" interface, an increasingly popular means to program smart cameras quickly.

-- By Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design