expressed in floating point units. There is some relationship between 2D and 3D image processing of course, but in essence the data treatment for 3D structures is very different, and has far higher CPU costs,’ says Forest. Nonetheless, he explains that approaches adapted from the 2D space, such as maintaining the neighbourhood information of data within the library, has allowed the applications to be sped-up in terms of processing time. Processing time is of key importance in all of
the industrial applications in which Aqsense has installed its software so far. In the food industry, for example, a system based on the 3D shape processing library has been used to measure the volume of pieces of bacon, cheese, ham, sausages, and other foodstuffs. Forest describes the way in which these vision systems are able to measure the volume of a piece of food, to a very high accuracy. The food can then be cut to slices or chunks of a certain weight, to a very close approximation, thereby eliminating the need to weigh each individual piece of food before packaging it. This, he says, saves a lot of time in food producing operations.
‘Typically it will take from 100 to 200ms to align two million to three million points’
In the automotive area, and also the industrial
sector in general, Aqsense has provided tools for dimensional tests, which used to check 100 per cent of the parts produced by a certain production line. Laser scanning or other scanning techniques allow an accurate scan to be produced. The point cloud data resulting from this scan of the individual part is then aligned against point clouds in the software’s library that correspond to the required shape of the part, and the system then reports on overall deviations of the part. The time taken to achieve this is impressively short: ‘Typically, it will take from 100 to 200ms to align two million to three million points,’ says Forest. Ease of use is as vital in the 3D arena as it is
in 2D, and Aqsense is working hard to keep its tools usable: ‘We strive to offer very easy-to- use tools, because we understand that these applications are in 3D, and that even though 3D has been prevalent in some areas of the industry for many years, such as reverse engineering or metrology, it is quite a new thing to the machine vision market. In addition to the support we also provide training and consultancy services. We strive to always do our best to provide very easy
The bead-inspection function within MIL is an example of intelligence added over conven- tional image processing. The use of such functions has improved with the increasing power and affordability of standard computers
concepts, so that the system integrator does not have to be a rocket scientist to make a program. We’re now providing a C++ interface, along with selling our own library.’ Beyond this, Forest says, the company aims
to be compatible with as many other products as possible, sub-licensing the library to Stemmer Imaging, for integration into the Common Vision Blox product, and providing interfaces for other libraries, such as LabView, Halcon, and MIL. ‘We want to be compatible with anybody, while focusing only on 3D,’ he adds.
Enabling hardware Daoust, from Vision for Vision, points out that the underlying factor allowing the whole industry to develop intelligent tools is the availability of inexpensive, high performance computer hardware, particularly processors. ‘When it comes to camera technology, [progress is] about higher resolutions, but enabling these higher resolutions is the fact that we have access to computer processors that can execute high level algorithms in a practical amount of time. It’s not that the approaches are necessarily brand new – some of the techniques have been around for a long time – but now we have the muscle to actually perform these operations in a practical amount of time, at typical production rates as opposed to having high tech algorithms that take ten minutes to implement well; that would be kind of useless on a production line.’ New approaches to image processing
have, Matrox’s Boriero says, opened up new applications, and allowed more people to tackle those applications. These users may not have the knowhow to develop applications from scratch, but thanks to the availability of highly capable packaged tools, they don’t need it.
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