Design of advanced vision systems for industrial inspection

High development costs of machine vision systems can be reduced by designing more general algorithms that can be used in a wide range of applications, by using modular system architectures in which new algorithms and more computational power can be added easily, depending on the needs of the given applications, and by using powerful tools for the design of, for example, new algorithms, hardware, software, optics, and illumination. This paper overviews the related research in progress at the University of Oulu. The topics to be discussed include hybrid computer architecture for machine vision, a color segmentation algorithm based on hierarchical connected components analysis, an interactive tool for performance analysis of parallel vision programs, and an object-oriented image processing library.