Multimedia extensions to prototyping software for machine vision

PIP (prolog image processing) is a prototyping tool, intended to assists designers of intelligent industrial machine vision systems. This article concentrates on the multi-media extensions to PIP, including: 1) on-line HELP, which allows the user to satisfy PIP goals from within the HELP facility, 2) lighting advisor, which gives advice to a vision engineer about which lighting/viewing arrangement is appropriate to use in a given situation, 3) device control, for operating a robot work cell, 4) speech input and (simple) natural language understanding, 5) speech synthesis, 6) remote operation of PIP via a local area network, and 7) remote operation of PIP via a local area network. At the time of writing, on-line access to PIP, via the Internet, is being developed.