Applications Case Studies

This chapter presents a variety of Case Studies. It is fruitless to describe all of the “blind alleys” which were investigated in order to reach these solutions. A typical example, such as the first one, which falls within the experience of a highly skilled user can be solved in literally a few minutes; within, say, half a day a large number of alternative and workable alternatives may have been found and investigated. All of the applications described below were investigated on behalf of industrial clients by one of the authors. There are numerous other instances where similar results have been obtained. Our objective in compiling this list was to indicate the wide range of the applications and the image processing operations which they require, as well as the importance to industry of Automated Visual Inspection as a major area of application for industrial vision systems and interactive image processing. It is of interest to note that in many instances the Interactive Image Processor was able to demonstrate the possibilities of using image processing for industrial inspection in situations where all other techniques failed. Moreover, “solutions” were often discovered in just a few minutes.