Lighting Education Archives

July 14, 2022 | Lighting Education

Food Contact and Aseptic Environment Considerations

Preventing contamination is a common priority for Food and Beverage processors. As these facilities grow and increase in efficiency, a single production run impacted by contamination can lead to a product recall and impact the health of tens of thousands of consumers. Until recently, metal detectors and X-rays played the dominant role, but increasingly the trend favors machine vision systems which have proven more effective at identifying small plastics and rubber contaminants. Continued implementation of machine vision for Extraneous Materials detection will help reduce food waste as well as lower costs and the risk of recalls.

November 12, 2021 | Application Notes

LED Color Temperature in Machine Vision

When specifying LED lighting for machine vision applications, the LED wavelength can have a significant impact on the success of the vision inspection. When utilizing white LEDs, it’s important to understand that the radiated emissions are a combination of most of the wavelengths from the visible spectrum; for white LEDs, the color temperatures range from […]

April 8, 2021 | Application Notes

PCB Inspection: Diffuse, Coaxial, and Low-Angle Lighting Techniques

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.

September 15, 2020 | Ai Technology

Photometric Stereo Technique

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.

July 21, 2020 | Application Notes

Lighting Technique: Diffuse Illumination

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.

March 11, 2020 | Application Notes

When Adequate Lighting Isn’t “Good Enough”

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”?

February 17, 2020 | Application Notes

Cylindrical Surface Inspection

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.

December 9, 2019 | Application Notes

Lighting Technique: Using Polarizing Filters in Machine Vision

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.

November 15, 2019 | Lighting Education

Effective Lighting Geometries for Plastic Lid Inspection

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.

October 9, 2019 | Application Notes

Detecting Presence or Absence in Packaging Inspection

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.

September 5, 2019 | Application Notes

Bright Field vs. Dark Field Lighting Techniques

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.

August 8, 2019 | Lighting Education

Importance of Thermal Management in Machine Vision

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.