Machine Vision standards have evolved providing defined models of how industrial cameras communicate to a PC allowing easier implementation of machine vision technology. Vision systems can be made up of cameras, frame grabbers and vision libraries from various manufacturers. The vision standards provides compatibility between the various manufacturers for easy implementation.
Machine vision applications require some basic tasks of finding and connecting to the cameras, configuring parameters, acquiring images and dealing with events to and from the cameras.
In order to provide cameras from various manufacturers to work together with 3rd party software and hardware from other manufacturers and provide the tasks above, a standard must be followed. “GenICam” is the basis for this standardization, providing compatibility using a Generic Transportation layer and Generic Application programming interface. These are referred to as “GenTL” and “GenAPI” respectively. GenTL provides the communication layer and GenAPI enables camera features to be configured by analyzing a compliant XML file for the camera.
Camera manufacturers however provide unique independent features providing various advantages from one to another. Creating these unique features blur the lines of the standard, not always making a camera fully compatible with another manufacturers software. For example, an industrial camera may use the GenTL layer to be recognized but may have special features making it unique as well.
This can be very confusing to understand! IDS Imaging has a white paper explaining the machine vision interface standardization, GenTL, GenAPI and the system architecture . CLICK BELOW NOW TO DOWNLOAD!
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1st Vision’s sales engineers have over 100 years of combined experience to assist in your camera selection. With a large portfolio of lenses, cables, NIC card and industrial computers, we can provide a full vision solution!
While not an exact figure, we would estimate that about half our client’s problems with machine vision camera connections, dropped frames, etc. comes back to a cabling issue. This is especially true for USB and GigE cameras.
In most of these cases, the issue is that the user is using a poor/low quality cable that was not made for the high speed and/or long distance demands of the application. Most inexpensive camera cables available via mail order are not made for use in high speed highly reliable data transfer applications. If your phone isn’t transferring at the full USB3 bandwidth, you normally don’t care. You probably don’t even know. But when you purchase a high speed USB3 camera and you can’t achieve its full frame rate, or you achieve it intermittently, this becomes a big issue.
This is the reason 1stVision offers ‘machine vision/industrial’ USB3 and GigE cables. These cables are tested to specs, come with screw locks to prevent the connectors from falling out, use larger gauge wire, are over molded. They are designed to be twisted and bent (somewhat) and are industrial!
Signal amplitude (the voltage of the signal in the cable) is a function of distance and frequency for cables. For instance, Ethernet is specified to 100 meters. So your cable should work when each device is 100 meters away. However, without the proper cable, you will not maintain the full 1000 Mbits/s data transfer rate! You might only be getting 50% of the speed depending upon the distance without a high quality cable.
Finally, consider the cost if your machine vision camera is part of an instrument or product that is being sold to your clients. We see far too many clients who try to save $30 on the cable only to find out that it is costing them thousands of dollars to trouble shoot a problem that can be easily solved with the proper part. Not to mention the cost to their client when the system isn’t working, and a hit to their reputation of not building a reliable system.
Here is our advice:
If you are in an industrial setting, you are compromising the reliability and robustness of your system if you are not using an ‘industrial cable’. Even if you are not operating at maximum speed of the camera, you should have these cables. BTW, these cables are not that much more expensive mail order cables. They are in the 10’s of dollars, but not in the 1’s of dollars.
If you are using USB3 cables, you should really be using ‘industrial’ cables. Current ‘inexpensive’ USB3 cables are not reliable at over 2M, and only 1M for USB C connector types. If you are using USB3 specifically to get the higher speeds from this protocol, then you absolutely need to be using ‘industrial’ cables. Inexpensive cables are not reliable for high speed data transmission.
If you are in a lab environment, with the cable never moving, and only going a short distance, then a high quality ‘inexpensive’ Cat 6e cable will work. There is a difference between inexpensive Ethernet cables. The one that came with the security camera all folder up is NOT what you should use. A reputable mail order cable vendor selling high quality patch cables is OK.
Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. At 1stVision, we offer these cables not to enrich ourselves, there is not much profit in a $30 cable, but rather to make sure our clients systems work well.
1st Vision’s sales engineers have over 100 years of combined experience to assist in your camera selection. With a large portfolio of lenses, cables, NIC card and industrial computers, we can provide a full vision solution!
Liquid lens technology, with its ability to change focus within the order of milliseconds is opening up a host of new applications in both machine vision and the life sciences. It is gaining growing interest from a wide cross section of applications and easily adapts to standard machine vision lenses.
Liquid lens technology alone provides nice solutions, but when combined with advanced controls, many more applications can be solved.
In this blog, we will highlight several case application areas for liquid lens technology.
Case 1: Applications requiring various focus points and extended depth of field: This does cover many applications, such as logistics, packaging and code reading in packaging. Optotune Liquid lenses provide the ability to have pre-set focus points, auto-focus or utilize distance sensors for feedback to the lens. In the example below, 2 presets can be programmed and toggled to read 2D codes at various heights essentially extending the depth of field.
Case 2: 3D imagery of transparent materials / Hyperfocal (Extended DOF Images: When using an Optotune liquid lens in conjunction with a Gardasoft TR-CL180 controller, sequence of images can be taken with the focus point stepped between each image. This technique is known as focus stacking. This will build up a 3D image of transparent environments such as cell tissue or liquid for analysis. This can also be used to find particles suspended in liquids.
A Z-stack of images can also be used to extract 3D data (depth of focus) and compute a hyper-focus or extended depth of field (EFOF) image.
The EDOF technique requires tacking a stack of individual well focused images which have preferably been synchronized with one flash per image. An example is show below with the rendered hyper focus image shown at right.
Case 3: Lens inspection: Liquid lenses can be used to inspect lenses, such as those in cell phones for dust and scratches looking through the lens stack.
Case 4: Bottle / Container inspection:Optotune Liquid lenses can be used to facilitate image bottom’s of glass bottles or containers of various heights.
Case 5: Large surface inspections with variation in height: Items ranging from PCB’s to LCD’s are not flat, have various component heights and need to be inspected at high magnification (typically using lenses with minimal DOF). Optotune Liquid lenses are a perfect solution using preset focus points.
Machine Vision applications using Optotune Liquid lenses and controller are endless!
These applications are just the tip of the iceberg and many more exist, but this will give you a good idea of capabilities. Gardasoft TR-CL controllers are fully GigE Vision compliant, so any compatible GigE Vision client image processing software such as Cognex VisionPro, Teledyne Dalsa Sherlock or National Instruments LABVIEW can be used easily.
1st Vision’s sales engineers have over 100 years of combined experience to assist in your camera selection. With a large portfolio of lenses, cables, NIC card and industrial computers, we can provide a full vision solution!
Pulsing (aka strobing) a machine vision LED lightis a powerful technique that can be beneficial to machine vision systems in various ways.
This blog post outlines 5 benefits you will receive from pulsing a LED light head. Gardasoft is an industry leader in strobe controllers capable of driving 3rd party LED light heads or custom LED banks for machine vision.
1 – Increase the LED light output
It is common to use pulsed light to “freeze” motion for high speed inspection. But, when the light is on only a short term in burst, its possible to increase the light output beyond the LED manufacturers specified maximum, using a technique called “Overdrive”. In many cases, the LED can be powered by 10X over the constant current power input in turn providing brighter pulses of light. When synchronized with the camera acquisition, a brighter scene is generated.
2 – Extend the life of the LED
As mentioned in the first benefit, strobing a LED light head only turns on the LED for short period of time. In many cases, the duty cycles are very low which extends the life of the LED and any degradation in turn, keeping the scene at a consistent brightness for years. (i.e. If the duty cycle is only 10%, the lifetime of the LED head will increase by 10%)
3 – Ambient Light control
Ambient light conditions frequently interfere with machine vision measurements and these issues can be solved by pulsing and over driving the system’s LEDs. For example, over driving the LED by 200% doubles the light intensity and enables the camera exposure to be halved, so reducing the effects of ambient light by a factor of 4. The end result is the cameras exposure is only utilizing light from the give LED source and NOT ambient light.
4 – High speed imaging and Increased depth of field
Motion blur in images from fast-moving objects can be eliminated with appropriate pulsing of the light. In some cases a defined camera exposure will be good enough to freeze motion (read our blog on calculating camera exposure), but may suffer in light intensity with constant illumination. “Over driving” a light can boost the output up to 10x its brightness rating in short pulses. Increased brightness could allow the whole system to be run faster because of the reduced exposure times. Higher light output may also allow the aperture to be reduced to give better depth of field.
Extended Depth of Field (DOF) is achieved with a brighter light allowing the f-stop to be turned down
Gardasoft controllers include our patented SafePower™ and SafeSense™ technology which prevents over driving from damaging the light.
5 -Multi-Lighting schemed & Computational Imaging
Lighting controllers can be used to reduce the number of camera stations. Several lights are set up at a single camera station and pulsed at different intensities and duration’s in a predefined sequence.
Generate edge and texture images using shape from shading
Each different lighting can highlight particular features in the image. Multiple measurements can be made at a single camera station instead of needing multiple stations and reduces, mechanical complexity saving money. For example, sequentially triggering 3 different types of lighting could allow a single camera to acquire specific images for bar code reading, surface defect inspection and a dimensional check in rapid succession.
Pulsing can also be used for computational imaging, where a component is illuminated sequentially by 4 different lights from different directions. The resultant images would be combined to exclude the effect of random reflections from the component surface. Contact us and ask for the white paper on Computational imaging to learn more
The images on the right (top and bottom) were taken with bright field and dark field lighting. The left images is the the result of the computational imaging combining the lighting techniques allowing particles and water bubble to be seen
Pulsed multiple lighting schemes can also benefit line scan imaging by using different illumination sources to capture alternate lines. Individual images for each illumination source are then easily extracted using image processing software.
In conclusion, strobe controllers can provide many benefits and save money in an overall setup more than the cost of a controller!
1st Vision’s sales engineers have over 100 years of combined experience to assist in your camera selection. With a large portfolio of lenses, cables, NIC card and industrial computers, we can provide a full vision solution!
For this application, a liquid lens is used in conjunction with a telescentric lens taking images through different heights of the lens stack. 
