There are scant few of us left: the machine vision professional who remembers the trials and tribulations of getting an analog (RS170, CCIR) camera signal timed, synched, strobed, and digitized competently into a computer for a machine vision application. Towards the end of the “analog machine vision age” this wasn’t too bad a process, but there were still issues with drivers, frame grabber hardware, computers, and software.
Enter “smart cameras”, the machine vision “cure-all”. Some suggested that tethered industrial cameras on a centralized computing platform would generally disappear. Not so, thankfully. Implementations of digital cameras over 1394a/b and USB appeared, followed closely by what is still an excellent (although expensive) industrial digital interface; CameraLink. Then, certain camera manufacturers started work on the GigEVision standard (sponsored by the AIA). With the release of this standard a few years ago, and the recent boom in available GigEVision cameras, digital industrial cameras have really come of age.
At the recent Quality Conference in Orlando, long-time machine vision expert Ned Lecky presented his views on the benefits and future of GigEVision. He noted that the ease with which multiple cameras can be interfaced to a PC platform, the availability of excellent PC-based machine vision software tools and packages, and the low cost of such a machine vision platform suggest that GigEVision systems might be the future of industrial inspection automation. I definitely agree. For now, the distributed smart camera architecture will continue to dominate. However, I believe that more end-users and integrators will begin to accept the centralized PC based systems again, particularly given the ease of implementation offered by the GigEVision cameras.
David
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