Sherlock
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Sherlock is a Windows-based machine vision software environment specifically intended to simplify development and deployment of high performance alignment, gauging, inspection, assembly verification, and machine guidance tasks. With ABSOLUTELY NO LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING REQUIRED, System Integrators and End-Users of machine vision find the rapid prototyping environment of Sherlock greatly reduces development time and helps speed time-to-market.

Examples of what you can do from within using Sherlock software:

• Graphically organize your entire machine vision strategy
• Interactively experiment with all functions of the MVTools library
• Confirm run-time executive performance
• Fine-tune variables and parameters
• Create custom vision algorithms
• Plot statistical data (SPC)
• Set or Read discrete I/O signals

The Sherlock software environment also provides Monitor, Surveillance, and SPC Reporter utilities for gaining insight into vision task program flow, internal/external events, internal variables, or other parameters as you run your machine vision application.

Sherlock capabilities are ideal for manufacturing applications in the automotive, consumer goods, textile, electronics, packaging, pharmaceutical, and plastics industries.

Features & Benefits

• 32 bit version
• Configure applications from a point-and-click environment - No Programming Required!
• Utilizes a single video monitor for setup, image display, and run-time user interface
• Set up to 5 different Image Preprocessing Algorithms for each AOI
• AOI's can be setup with their own Image Analysis Algorithms
• Peaks, Formulas, Subroutines and I/O events are all created graphically
• Tolerancing of all calculations permits pass/fail and SPC results handling
• Support for custom algorithms
• Highly customized reports can be sent to one or more destinations
• Internal Statistical Process Control (SPC) package
• Easy tie-in to third-party hardware and software for networking, SPC, custom front-ends and more

Applications

Sherlock can be configured for various applications such as:

• Assembly Verification
• Gauging
• Flaw Detection
• Prescence/Absence
• OCV (Optical Character Verification)
• Robot Guidance
• Barcoding
• OCR (Optical Character Reading; optional)

System Requirements

• PC running Win95/98 or WinNT 4.0/2000 (Pentium 133 MHz minimum, algorithms are optimized for MMX technology)
• 64 MB of RAM for Windows NT/2000; 32 MB for Windows 95/98
• 20 MB of hard disk free space
• PCVision and IC-ASYNC for standard applications
• IC-VS, IC-FA, IC-COMP (Mono), PC-COMP (Mono), PC-DIG or IC-DIG frame grabber for non-standard applications
• SVGA monitor
• Keyboard and mouse

Image Capture

• PCVision, IC-FA, IC-COMP (Mono), IC-DIG, IC-ASYNC, PC-DIG, PC-COMP (Mono) frame grabbers:
  
• Monochrome area scan: RS-170, CCIR, or digital cameras PC-DIG and IC-DIG: with 10 and 12 bit cameras only the upper 8 bits will be processed
  
• Monochrome line scan: continuous processing is not guaranteed
• Support for external trigger, asynchronous frame reset, image capture while processing (image ping-pong), strobe.
  

Image Handling - "Stakeouts"

• Stakeouts are defined areas for image display and image processing.
• Stakeouts can display stored bitmap images, as well as live or captured camera images.
• Can store and copy images to bitmap files.
• Capable of panning, scrolling, cropping and zooming (un-zooming) images.
  

Regions of Interest - "Peeks"

• All processing and analysis can be performed with one or multiple Peeks.
• Peeks can be single point peeks, line peeks, or area peeks as large as the whole image.
• Peeks can be interactively rotated, moved, resized, or copy/pasted.
• Peeks can be automatically placed relative to other object locations on newly acquired images.
• Line Peeks include: Line, Circle and Arc
• Area Peeks include: Rectangle, Annulus, and Torus and Point
• Composite Line Peeks include: Spoke, Bulls-eye, and Rake

Image Processing within a Peek

• Area Peeks: 1x11, 3x3, 3x3Sum, Dice, DFilate (3x3), DynThresh, Equalize, Erode (3x3), FDiffX, FDiffY, FDiffXY, Gain/Offset, Golden, HFlip, HProject, Image Add, Image And, ImageMax, Image Min, Image Or, Image Retrieve, Image save, Image SubAB, Image SubBA, Image Sub Abs, Image Xor, Invert, Kirsch, LaPlace, Median, Normalize, PrewittX, PrewittY, PrewittXY, Roberts, Rotate, SDiffX, SDiffY, SDiffCY, (3x3)Sharpen, Smooth (3x3), SobelX, SobelY, SobelXY, ThreshDn, ThreshIn, ThreshInv, Threshold, ThreshST, ThresUp, VFlip
  
  
• Line Peeks: Dilate (1x3), Equalize, Erode(1x3), Golden, Gradient, Invert, Sharpen (1x3), Smooth, ThreshDn, ThreshIn, ThreshInv, Threshold, ThreshUp, 1x5
  

Image Analysis within a Peek

• Area Peeks: Average, Barcode (code 39 standard), Centroid, Circum, Connectivity, Count, Diam, Extrema, Line, Protrude, LineLength, Mark (Optical Character Verification), MultiCount, OCR (optional), Sum, Thread, Variance, Wave and Search
  
  
• Line Peeks: Average, Centroid, Count, EdgeCount, FirstBackEdge, FirstEdge, InsideCaliper, MaxEdge, MaxBackEdge, MinMax, MultiCount, OutsideCaliper, Sum, and Variance
  
  
• Composite Peeks Only: Circum, Diam
  

Geometric Operations

• Distances, Angles, Best Line, Best Circle, Line Intersection, Line Perpendicular, Point to Line, and Line to Line.
  

Variable Operations

• Label, merge, store, reuse, and report every point and value placed in your investigation.
  

Report Generation

• Standard: Tolerance any reading, collect and report off-line or real-time mean, variance, max, min, Cp, CpK for multiple readings, display real time strip charts and read histograms, interface to 3rd party SPC packages.
  
• Custom: Fully customizable inspection reports to the screen, serial, Printer, and/or disk. Also interfaces easily to various 3rd party SPC software packages such as Applied Statics
  

Calibration

• Each camera can be individually calibrated.
• Linear and non-linear including perspective and optical distortion compensation
• Calibration is used to return camera coordinates (device coordinates) or real world coordinates (physical coordinates).
• Multiple calibrations per camera
• Automatic recalibration

Illumination Control

• Automatically controls on/off, binary or analog programmable lights.
  

I/O

• Serial I/O, digital I/O (via 24bit I/O add-in ISA board), analog I/O (via add-in ISA board), file I/O, control SPC data or inspection reporter, and user defined audio output.

Motion

• Support for PC or stand alone motion controller via DLL or Visual Basic.

Customization

• Custom Interface: Allows complete front end control of Sherlock in a "server" mode through Visual Basic OCX
• Custom algorithms: Complete source code in C++ comes standard for developing a completely custom application

Supporting Documentation

• Context-sensitive on-line help
• Example programs, images, & sample VisualBasic interface programs
• Complete user's manual