Almost Human: Lifelike Color Sensing Improves Vision Inspection

Vision inspection systems have come a long way in the relatively short time they've been around. Not long ago, they are limited to binary (black or white) or gray scale images and required complex illumination schemes to optimize contrast and differentiate objects. It wasn't unusual for operators to continually adjust object position, orientation, lighting, and optics to achieve consistent and stable results. Even then, the results were limited in terms of resolution and contrasted based on 256 shades of gray or black and white.

When color sensing was introduced, vision palettes were still limited to 256 hues and the color data had to be converted to grayscale to achieve faster processing speeds. Lacking accuracy, early color vision systems suffered from high false rejection and pass rates. Color inspection also lacked tool to help quality and maintenance people identify root causes of true faults and initiate timely corrective actions.