Vision systems on the Internet

Hitherto, it has been assumed that an industrial Machine Vision systems is constructed as an integrated unit, with the camera, image processing unit and control/display console being located close to one another and to the object/scene being inspected. For several reasons, it may be helpful to separate them, so that only the camera and its associated lighting units are located on the factory floor, while other equipment, such as computers and user terminals, is located elsewhere, out of harm's way. We describe three systems that allow multiple cameras and several separate image processing engines, to be controlled remotely from a single "intelligent" device, or a user working via a standard web browser. The paper describes and compares several different approaches to building such a system. Links to the networked vision systems mentioned here are provided in an accompanying web site.