Appropriately illuminating populated circuit boards (PCBs) for vision inspection can be challenging. The variety of shapes, sizes, finishes, colors, and whole host of different components can increase complexity. This application note highlights available lighting techniques to deliver feature-appropriate contrast for robust inspection applications.
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When selecting individual components for or investing in turn-key machine vision systems, acceptable performance, system longevity, and cost are always high priorities. Other factors you should consider in the earliest stages of designing a machine vision system: thermal management and heat dissipation.
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For many surfaces, simple defects such as scratches and dents are easily identifiable with a machine vision camera and a traditional lighting solution. However, some objects have 3D aspects that make accurately identifying surface defects more difficult. To achieve feature-appropriate surface contrast to gather a 3D perspective, Photometric Stereo may be applied.
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Surfaces prone to uneven reflectivity are often challenging to inspect – particularly with bright-field point sources commonly used in machine vision systems. To achieve more uniform contrast over such surfaces, one solution is to apply diffuse lighting.
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It’s important to consider color when specifying lighting for a machine vision application – both the color of the subject, and the color of the lighting – and how each may affect object-to-background contrast.
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Today there is a wide variety of lighting sources, types, geometries, and wavelengths available for vision engineers to apply, often with more than one type or geometry functioning adequately. But with the many overlapping choices, how do we determine whether a lighting solution is, or is not, truly “good enough”?
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Not all surfaces respond similarly to standard direct illumination techniques. Surface color, texture, shape, and composition can all influence where and how much of the incident light is reflected into a vision camera, greatly affecting the inspection results. Read on for our example of inspecting a cylindrical surface.
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Robust vision light solutions often face one challenge: unwanted glare. In this post, we concentrate on how to reduce glare from vision lighting – particularly from a part’s curved, specular surface, which is one of the most common application uses for polarizers.
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Lighting plastic lids for inspection poses many challenges. Because of the variety of surface texture, reflectivity, color, and orientations, finding the correct inspection solution can present challenges that may affect the choice of lighting geometry.
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Packaging inspection has typically presented a variety of challenges for machine vision developers and integrators alike. This is primarily because of the wide range in types of packaging – materials, colors, sizes, shapes, and textures used.
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Determining whether to apply lights in a bright field versus dark field geometry is one of the more difficult decisions facing Machine Vision engineers. Both techniques have advantages and disadvantages: in this blog, we will concentrate on a comparison between the two using common vision applications.
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In machine vision, backlighting is one of the most common and useful lighting techniques. However, incorporating backlighting into machine vision systems can be difficult, primarily because component placement geometry requires access to the part top and bottom (or front and back) for the camera and backlight.
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