Gaining Machine Vision Knowledge

Machine vision is not a discipline in itself, such as mechanical engineering. It is a skill involving specialized equipment. How you should go about gaining that skill depends on your goals.

If you simply want to gain proficiency with specific equipment in your plant, the best place to start is with the manufacturer of that equipment. Virtually all vision-system suppliers provide excellent user manuals and similar documentation in printed and online form.

Some, such as Cognex and Dalsa also provide tutorial material, such as white papers and application examples, to give basic background needed to understand, interpret, and troubleshoot the system results. Others, such as National Instruments, also provide hands-on training classes that cover machine vision basics, applications, and more advanced topics.

If you wish to develop real machine vision expertise, start by reading one of the many good texts on machine vision, such as Machine Vision by Ramesh Jain et al, or Understanding and Applying Machine Vision, by Nello Zuech. It is best to obtain and read texts by different authors because each has specific interests and areas of expertise, which will be reflected in their books.

Edmund Optics’ website provides an extensive online library containing many authoritative articles covering technical aspects of machine vision. An advantage of this library is that the company has a long history retailing optical components to amateurs and professionals with a wide range of abilities and interests, and distributes equipment from several name-brand manufacturers as well as having its own world-class optics manufacturing facilities. The library thus contains articles at technical levels ranging from very basic to highly advanced and covering many application areas.

Finally, a Google search on “machine vision course” turned up almost 3 million hits, including a number of online courses, such as Automated Vision Systems’ Fundamentals of Machine Vision. Other courses are provided by universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The topics you’ll need to familiarize yourself with are optics, lighting, electro-optics, data acquisition, computer image processing, and automation networking. The educational resources available are quite extensive. How to proceed depends strongly on your goals.

In any case, it might be wise to start with free online white papers for background, along with practical experience with real equipment. From there, you can go as far as you want, even to becoming a recognized expert on machine vision.

- by Charle Masi, Control Engineering (US)