Imaging functionality in Sapera's machine vision software

Imaging power and functionality caters for most machine vision applications - Sapera LT, Sapera Processing and Sapera Essential

In the previous issue, a brief introduction summarized Dalsa's intelligent machine vision software as a board level acquisition and control with image processing tools. Sapera is used for the design, development and deployment of high performance machine vision applications.

In this month's issue, some of the machine vision software's important tools and functions will be discussed as this relates to most industrial machine vision applications.

Sapera is available in 3 different packages: Sapera LT, Sapera Processing and Sapera Essential. All of which include Dalsa's Trigger-to-image reliability for securing image acquisition and error recovery.

Sapera LT - machine vision software

Sapera LT is a suite of hardware-independent C and C++ machine vision software libraries and drivers for image acquisition, display and control that supports all Coreco imaging hardware devices. It includes acquisition control, display, graphics, buffer control, diagnostic and monitoring.

The key to Sapera's strength and reliability is defined in its Trigger-to-image reliability features which ensure reliable and traceable image acquisition and recovery if errors do occur. Errors can include such events as early triggers, bus overflow and others and features such as image tagging, event triggers are some of the tools offered by Sapera.

Sapera LT also buffers image activity by necessary synchronization. In the case of image queue overflow, its buffer control helps track and record images that are discarded or overwritten. Target validation also enables incoming images to be validated uniquely in real-time machine vision inspections.

Sapera Processing - machine vision software

Sapera Processing features a full list image processing tools including, advanced Search, OCR, barcode decoding, Blob analysis and others.

Its image processing libraries include tools for filtering, geometry, measurement, morphology, point-to-point, segmentation, transform operations, and subpixel edge detection.

Search-pattern matching helps determine location and alignment quickly and accurately under poor and uneven lighting conditions. This includes the correlation-based and geometric-based algorithms achieving accuracies of up to 1/50th of a pixel. This function makes Sapera suited for most demanding alignment applications.

Optical character recognition (OCR) enables Sapera Processing to support various degraded and poorly illuminated images. These include solid and dot matrix fonts, standard and user trainable fonts and scale/aspect ratio invariants.

Sapera Processing also locates and decodes both "UNI" and 2D barcodes. The barcode tool includes rapid, robust algorithms and functions, and is fully rotational/scale invariant.

Lastly Sapera Processing does blob analysis by separating the foreground objects from the background. The blob analysis can be used to calculate more than 50 spatial and grayscale blob features. These include area, location, perimeter, elongation, roundness, convexity, bounding box and orientation.

Sapera Essential - machine vision software

Sapera Essential includes many of the common tools used for vision which are a subset of Sapera processing.

Sapera Essential comes bundled with CamExpert - a camera configuration utility. The Windows based utility provides an interactive environment used to create new or modify existing configuration files from area and line-scan applications.

CamExpert features:

* Enhanced graphical user interface with camera-centric parameters
* Live grab and display window for online parameter tweaking
* Sophisticated waveform view improves understanding of signal inter-relationships
* Interactive waveform tools allows precise timing parameter setup

Sapera Essential also features a geometric search tool for quick and accurate target pattern recognition. The search tool recognizes up to 5 instances regardless of orientation and lighting conditions. Sapera Essential also comes with ActiveX controls for rapid application development.

Sapera and all Dalsa Coreco products are represented and fully supported throughout Australia and New Zealand by a team of imaging software engineers from Adept. Phone, fax and email support are supplied to help our customers come up-to-speed quickly and efficiently with Sapera.

For more information or to purchase please contact Adept Electronic Solutions at www.adept.net.au Tel Sydney (02) 99792599 Perth (08) 92425411