Thursday, March 25, 2010

A little knowledge

VIDEO: By adding intelligence to their products, vendors will reduce the need for software development by their customers while opening a path to even more sophisticated systems.

Editor's Note: Watch the video version of editor Andy Wilson's "My View" blog, where you'll get Andy's unique take on what's buzzing through the machine-vision marketplace or just what's been buzzing through his mind lately. You can also read Andy's "My View" as seen in the February issue of Vision Systems Design.

Anyone who has been involved with computer vision for a number of years will testify that much work needs to be done before machine-vision systems can emulate the power of the human visual system. Despite hardware advances in multicore CPUs, DSPs, GPUs, and FPGAs, researchers are still far from modeling how the human brain perceives and understands the visual world.

Yet many machine-vision systems require only simple measurement tasks to be performed. It is often not necessary to perform sophisticated image-processing functions to analyze image features. In these cases, simpler algorithms such as edge detection, histogram analysis, thresholding, and blob analysis can be used to perform a desired image-analysis function.