see how the algorithm is coping; it will start to fail as the objects get too close to the edges.’ Vision for Vision is still working to enrich the
library of functions, Daoust says, as there are many areas of image processing that the product needs to be extended to. The company is also improving the scripting concept: ‘Currently the scripts that we can generate and handle are linear with no choice decisions, or loops. In the future we will turn this simple scripting mechanism into a fully fledged programming language. I am sure that customers will require that.’
A colour recognition component within MIL analyses an image of colourful sweets
a highly interactive prototyping workbench. The focus is on the interactivity, in the sense that they get instant feedback on the image processing operations that they apply.’ When designing an image processing solution, says Daoust, users must combine a number of processing steps, each of which has its own intermediate results, and each of which has its own tuneable parameters. In traditional solutions, this processing is achieved step- by-step, often as the result of a script, and it is not easy to see the effect of each individual step or of individual parameter settings. ‘In our environment, whatever processing steps you include or whatever parameter setting you choose, you see the results instantly. Whatever parameter you change, the results are displayed immediately. This leads to more insight into what you’re doing, into the performance of the chain of operations, and into the exact effect of the various parameters,’ he says. Ultimately, this kind of approach can allow
image processing solutions to be developed very quickly. The workbench software can be interfaced with machine vision cameras, and as the user can experiment with the devices while observing the output on a live video output. ‘That tells you a lot,’ say Daoust. ‘We can see a lot of things just by looking at real-time processing, and we can put probes wherever you want within the various processing steps, so as to see the results of intermediate steps as well. When we’re looking at the outputs of an experiment as a live data stream, we are in effect doing 20 experiments per second, whereas if it was a point-and-click application, it would take you one minute to do one experiment. Also, with this approach you can easily test the limit conditions of what you’re looking at. For example, if you are examining a certain component, you can move it around [in front of the camera] until it reaches the edges of the image, and you will immediately
Software for the third dimension Image processing algorithms work on matrices of data, with each value corresponding to a point on the 2D image. When making the shift to visual algorithms for use in 3D processing, these algorithms are no longer sufficient, and specialised 3D libraries must be used. Josep Forest is technical director at Aqsense, a Spanish company specialising in this kind of 3D image processing by offering a 3D shape analysis library, and which is another entry in the Vision Award. ‘It’s purely 3D, in that we
‘Today’s customers are pressed in terms of time to get a solution up-and-running as quickly as possible, and they don’t necessarily have the time to fiddle with all of the parameters’
don’t deal with images, but solely with point clouds,’ he explains. ‘An image, for example, is a collection of matrix values. They could be greyscale values for a monochrome image or they could be in values in the red, green or blue planes, but images are essentially always composed of matrices of values.’ This, he says, is important, because of the way in which neighbours are preserved between points in the real world and points in the matrix, making it easier to perform operations on the data. In the 3D scheme, however, this is more
difficult to achieve. ‘Point clouds don’t necessarily keep neighbourhood unless we find some way to do that. Also, when we represent a point cloud we cannot treat it as if it was an image. We have to represent it on the screen and give it different movements, such as rotating or translating in three axes. Additionally, point clouds are always
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