The simple answer is an enormous range of applications, from defect inspection of semiconductor wafers to notifying a painting robot which style of vehicle is coming next - and countless others. This section attempts to show the flexibility of machine vision through typical applications:
Gauging/measurement
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Can inspection in the food industry
As with all canning applications,inspection must take place at high speed; in this one at 20 parts per second. The requirement is to inspect a can for ovality and the bottom of the can for defects, and check for absence of dents, edge rollovers and foreign objects.
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Disposable needle inspection
The disposable needles used in insulin pen injectors used by diabetics need to be straight and sharp. A complete vision cell was designed and installed for checking on production line.
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Identification
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Needle-stamped ID codes on metal
Metal parts are often coded by needle stamping characters. This results in a very robust ID that will easily survive subsequent manufacturing process and therough environmental conditions found in metal-working factories. However, they can be very difficult for an image processing system to identify.
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Character recognition
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PCB inspection
An early adopter of machine vision as an aid in quality assurance, today's electronics industry uses components that carry detailed identification which needs to be checked. Changing the object's illumination simplified the task.
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Presence verification
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Where are my screws?
Ever unpacked a piece of flat-pack furniture and found a piece missing? A machine vision system provided a leading manufacturer with a 100% inspection solution for checking the contents of flat packed furniture prior to dispatch.
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Assembly checking a car AC unit
A car air-conditioning unit comprises many small parts, all of which need to be present before installation. Initially, checking this is easy but the size of the unit meant 14 cameras were required - and there were interesting lighting and gauging requirements.
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Print inspection
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Fuel gauge
The basis of print inspection is checking the differences between the object being checked and a stored reference image, a technique that works admirably when checking print quality on a fuel gauge.
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Circular syringe barrel
Verifying the quality and position of print on a tubular structure like a syringe barrel requires a different approach: use a linescan camera rather than a CCD camera and pre-processing to orient the image for checking - and all in 100 milliseconds.
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