by Stephen Albanese, Matrox and Alan Reeves, JL Automation

Many machine vision integrators and OEMs continue to rely on proprietary vision hardware, but "building your own" may no longer fit with today's fast-paced, price-driven market. Time-to-market concerns; the expense of developing, manufacturing, and testing vision boards; software development; as well as other issues; make the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) PC vision technology a more attractive option.

As all developers will tell you, one of the major pressures in today's competitive global environment is time to market. Development cycles are being squeezed and systems must not only be lower cost than previous solutions, but must also provide more performance. Given these demands, it may be wise for developers of machine vision systems to take a closer look at technology available in the PC world. Every new generation in the PC world delivers more performance at less cost. PC technology offers inexpensive powerful hardware, platform independent software, rapid application development programming tools and industry standard operating environments for building low-cost, high-performance vision systems. Other advantages include portability and maintainability of applications.

For JL Automation (JLA), a machine vision integrator from Sunderland, UK, moving to COTS PC vision technology has meant quicker build cycles, increased profitability and greater market share. Prior to purchasing off-the-shelf PCI vision boards from Matrox (Dorval, Quebec, Canada), JLA designed and manufactured its own vision cards. For a relatively small company, putting resources into constantly redesigning and upgrading cards was a drain on resources, incurring time and staff costs. Additionally, manufacturing and testing the cards took too much time and required staff to be employed specifically for this.

Another issue that JLA faced in building its own hardware was stocking inventory. Now, JLA purchases vision boards to fill their own orders for systems and no longer has to worry about the expense of building and stocking boards. Obtaining cards is as easy as faxing a purchase order to the vision vendor. This is saving JLA time and has helped to bring down costs.As well, with COTS PC technology, JLA can solve a range of applications without having to actually develop a range of hardware. For some applications PCI frame grabbers are used to transfer image data to system RAM in real time, where the host CPU is used to process images. For demanding real-time applications, where host-processing is not sufficient, real-time DSP-based PCI image processors are available. Instead of investing time and money to develop a line of their own cards, JLA can now concentrate on solving applications, and devote their full attention to integration issues such as such as lighting, optics, and mechanics.

With COTS PC technology, JLA has been able to ride the wave of increasing PC performance. Vendors like Matrox build inexpensive PCI frame grabbers to allow integrators like JLA to exploit the ever increasing power of PC processors. And when more speed is required for more demanding or high-speed, real-time applications, dedicated DSP-based PCI image processors like the new Matrox Genesis can be used. This way, an integrator can build the most cost-effective system for any given application by choosing from a variety of boards with different price/performance levels. A £10, 000 system won't be of any use if the customer is only willing or able to pay £6,000 for a solution.

But hardware is only part of a successful COTS PC vision solution. Software remains key to developing a system on time and within budget. Using COTS PC vision software helps alleviate headaches like maintaining your own library. With COTS, this becomes entirely the vision vendor's problem. Other advantages include a wealth of imaging development aids such as interactive camera interface utilities, rapid prototyping programs, and utilities for performing benchmark tests; all developed and maintained by the vision vendor and designed to bring products to market faster and with less development effort.

With a vision vendor's support of Windows environments, an integrator can benefit from mainstream application development programming tools which are also designed to speed up time to market. These tools, like Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C/C++, are intended to make it easy to develop Windows applications quickly. Also, by working with an industry standard, robust, widely available 32-bit operating system like Windows NT, applications are more easily maintained and portable.

The lower build costs and quicker turn-around time associated with using COTS PC technology to build vision solutions means that an integrator can offer systems at very reasonable prices, sometimes displacing older, more expensive technologies such as electronic sensors and UV detectors. Access to inexpensive, DSP-based PCI image processors may open up new markets for integrators as well. For example, an integrator not already building systems for high-speed web inspection may be able to tackle this market using a COTS PCI image processor and offer a system for a much lower cost than a competitor not using off-the-shelf technology.

Giving up control of designing vision technology, however, may not be easy. For risk-averse integrators, it means very careful selection of a vision vendor to fullfill all requirements. First and foremost, if you select a reliable vision vendor, you can reduce the risk of discontinued products and wasted development effort. One of the other requirements will likely be one stop shopping, which means choosing a vendor that offers a range of hardware for acquisition, processing, and display, along with software.

An integrator will probably want a vision library that is fairly comprehensive to avoid having to write a lot of custom code. But there should be a way to implement custom code in the library to give an integrator the flexibility to use their own code. Being able to use legacy code with a vision vendor's software means that an integrator doesn't throw away years of software development effort. And for optimum use of COTS PC technology, integrators need a vendor that keeps pace with new versions of operating systems, compilers, and other PC development tools.

And finally, a technical support department dedicated to handling the needs of OEMs and integrators should be accessible to provide a quick response to any integration issues that may arise.

By using COTS PC vision technology, time-to-market cycles can be reduced to weeks instead of months or years and build costs are reduced, all while maintaining the level of quality needed to keep customers happy and make them repeat customers.

JLA uses COTS PC technology to develop systems that are solving label inspection and robotics applications. One label inspection unit inspects the plastic lids of margarine tubs at a rate of several lids per second. The lids are presented by a handling system which then triggers the vision system to capture the image at the right moment. Various features within the design of the label are inspected to ensure the label's proper alignment on the lid, as well as the lid's presence. Critical information, such as the sell-by date is also inspected to make sure it is present.

A second application is a robotics system that deals with positional and orientation inspection, allowing the vision system to send coordinates to robots so that they can pick up parts. All of the parts are metallic assemblies, fairly small in size. Each of the assemblies has different key features which are used to identify orientation. The parts are presented along a conveyor belt at about 1 per second, and once a part is in position, the vision system grabs a frame, analyzes it, and sends the coordinates to the robot.

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