Over the last decade, consumer cameras have improved dramatically. Images taken with today’s latest DSLRs, Point and Shoot cameras and even smartphones are incredibly impressive. Decades worth of R&D have contributed to improvements in speed, low-light performance, resolution and color accuracy. Capturing a stunning landscape, macro, or portrait image can easily be done by any modern low-cost camera available today.
With all the improvements in consumer-grade cameras, one wonders if architects developing industrial vision systems should consider using them as their camera solution. Let’s take a step back to examine what makes these images look good and what the vision system is looking to accomplish.
Consumer-grade cameras improve the look of an image by manipulating the pixels in the image after it has been taken by the sensor. The goal is to improve the look of the image specifically and this is done using a number of common and/or proprietary software filters such as sharpen, blur, brightness/contrast, gamma, and color/tone enhancements. Some cameras may also have a physical antialiasing filter to remove the sharpness of the image to prevent aliasing artifacts. After the image alterations have been made, it is then often compressed to a more portable PC or web friendly format. In the end, the resulting image (raw or compressed) does not accurately represent the data originally captured by the sensor.
Within an industrial vision system, the objective of taking a photo is to utilize the image for analysis, such as color or pattern matching, measuring, or medical diagnostics. Since industrial cameras don’t enhance the look of the image with software or hardware filters and don’t move pixels around to increase the compression ratio, what it sees is what you get. In other words, only a camera specifically designed for industrial use can provide a reliable, unaltered, usable image.
Lumenera designs and develops the best quality industrial cameras in the industry with a stringent quality control process that ensures camera-to-camera consistency. Images captured are completely raw and unaltered so that that the information you receive can be trusted for proper analytics.
So leave the consumer cameras for what they were designed to do: taking selfies, or images of your pets and family vacations.
