Matrox Iris GT colour smart cameras now work with Design Assistant 2.4 software to offer new possibilities for manufacturing control and inspection. Matrox Design Assistant 2.4 flowchart-based integrated development environment introduces a set of tools to identify parts, products, and items using colour, in addition to assessing quality from colour and isolating features using colour.
Working with colour machine vision systems poses unique challenges but it also brings some unique capabilities for manufacturing control and inspection.
The majority of today’s machine vision systems restrict themselves to greyscale image analysis. In certain instances however, it is unreliable or even impossible to just depend upon intensity and/or geometric (i.e. shape) information. In these cases, the flexibility of colour machine vision software is needed.
Colour images contain a greater amount of data to process (i.e. typically three times more) than greyscale images and require more intricate handling. Efficient and optimised software tools are needed to analyse these images in a reasonable amount of time. Matrox Design Assistant 2.4 includes a comprehensive set of tools to isolate, identify and classify items using colour.
The Colour Matcher step determines the best matching colour from a collection of samples for each region of interest within an image. A colour sample can be specified either interactively from an image, with the ability to mask out undesired colours, or using numerical values. A colour sample can be a single colour or a distribution of colours (i.e. histogram). The colour matching method and the interpretation of colour differences can be manually adjusted to suit particular application requirements.
