LET THERE BE
LIGHT
Without light, many other bits of machine vision kit would not work, so this particular sector is a key piece within the jigsaw. We kick this feature off with a piece from CCS, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of LE D Lighting components for machine vision for their view of the current machine vision lighting market.
CCS VIEW Lighting the way for machine vision success ‘The global machine vision market is a multi-billion dollar industry which has enjoyed outstanding growth in recent years. Lighting, of course, is a critical component of this. As the machine vision market as a whole has matured and evolved, three key areas have emerged for lighting manufacturers: development of core illumination technologies, seamless integration of lighting within machine vision systems (including readily accessible lighting data via networks), and increased levels of control and functionality within plug & play, easy to use formats and processes. Illumination technology Being the most commonly used illumination source in machine vision applications, LED Lighting has a rich array of products on the market offering a choice of geometries, wavelengths and intensities to meet a wide variety of needs. While developments in these traditional lighting solutions continue, there is also an increasing emphasis on the way that lighting is used that opens up new opportunities. These include multi-spectral imaging using lights with different wavelengths to detect different characteristics from an object, where uniform spectral output of LEDs is required and adoption of developments such as natural white LEDs in the visible spectrum offer application benefits. Lighting requirements are also frequently market driven. One example is the transparency of silicon to SWIR
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illumination, making its use popular in the semiconductor industry; another example being the varying absorption rates of IR with different types of plastics where by using selected wavelengths in SWIR, waste-sorting can be effectively achieved, since you can identify plastics by their absorption rates. There is also significant development in areas where new illumination technology is contributing to solutions for applications which are too complex for traditional methods. Computational Imaging (CI), or multi-shot imaging, is one example where it is essential for applications where a oneshot system is insufficient because of complexities such as curved or uneven surfaces, different textures and reflectivity, embossed characters, or differing heights of inspected objects. Multi-shot Imaging relies on data extracted from a series of individual images captured under different lighting or optical conditions - a ‘computed’ image is then created and this contains the most relevant details for a particular machine vision task. OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) lighting technology is now becoming commercially available. With a large light emitting surface in a housing typically just a few mm thick and an exceptionally stable and uniform light intensity, OLEDs can also be moulded into complex shapes, opening up new application opportunities, and providing very compact machine design capabilities because of the physical size of illumination products and their exceptionally low heat dissipation characteristics. In tandem with these emerging technologies, manufacturers are expanding the ‘plug & play’ functionality
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