Machine Vision: One of Our Core Competences

For nearly a decade, Insight Scientific has been continuously pouring its resources and efforts into technology development in the field of machine vision. It is one of our most fundamental technologies which is key to the development of Insight Scientific’s intelligent visual inspection systems, precision assembly equipment and other complex automation systems. In this area, our focus is on sophisticated multi-functional machine vision systems, which include customized lighting structures, tailored image acquisition processes, and self-developed image processing and analysis algorithms. In some of the more challenging applications such as surface defect detection and ultra-high precision measurements we also introduce the concept of sensor fusion where multiple types of sensors are used to acquire more complete sets of information for wholistic analyses of target objects

What’s Sensor Fusion?
Sensor fusion is the process of merging data from multiple sensors to create a more accurate conceptualization of the target scene or object. This is how human beings perceive the physical world. Before any decision is made, our body is provided with sensory information through our peripheral nervous system. The information our nerve system picks up including vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, etc.  The brain uses these sources of sensory input to validate an event and to make a decision.

How Sensor Fusion helps out machine vision?
Machine vision applications may have many different forms, but they all share a fundamental function. That is to observe an object and make a judgement about its states. However, due to its inherent limitations, a machine vision system can only acquire a partial set of the information of an object, 2D images.  By using more than one source of information from different types of sensors, we can get a better understanding of the states of the target object.

Over the past years, we have been using combination of laser scanning devices and/or mechanical tactile sensors in conjunction with CCD cameras to get information on object surface properties and its 3D characteristics in addition to its 2D imagine properties. With this, Insight Scientific has been able to successfully improve detection accuracy of our intelligent inspection systems. It has greatly helped Insight Scientific to position itself as the industry leader in this area.