Many countries in the world, e.g. Germany and Japan, depend on high export rates. It is therefore necessary for them to strive for a high degree of quality in the products and processes exported. The example of Japan shows in a significant manner that a competitor should not be feared just because he can offer cheaper products. They become a “source of danger” when these products also achieve a high degree of quality. Thus, survival in the market depends on the ability to recognize the implications of technical and economic developments, to draw the perhaps unpopular conclusions for production, and to make the right decisions. This particularly applies to measurement and inspection equipment for quality control. Here, besides electro-optical sensors in general, image processing systems play an important role because they can emulate the conventional form of visual inspection by a human operator — i.e., the methods used in industry when dealing with quality inspection and control. In combination with precision indexing tables and industrial robots, image processing systems can be extended to new fields of application. The great awareness of the potential applications of vision and image processing systems has led to a variety of realized applications, some of which will be described below under three topics: • electro-optical measurement systems, • automation of visual inspection tasks, and • robot guidance.
|
