Advances: Machine vision products, standards
Recent new product and standards advances include FDA traceability, higher speed, and connectivity and integration standards.
Machine vision capabilities have increased recently with new products and standards developments for FDA traceability, higher speeds, and connectivity and integration.
FDA unit-level traceability
Cognex Corp., supplier of machine vision systems, recently announced a new version of its In-Sight Track & Trace identification and data verification solution for healthcare serialization. A follow-up to successful deployments of In-Sight Track & Trace 1.0, this version includes enhancements that address additional requirements for pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to achieve unit-level product traceability. Customers can use In-Sight Track & Trace 2.0 with multiple networked In-Sight vision systems to decode human-readable text along with 2D and 1D barcodes, including Data Matrix, GS1-128, GS1 DataBar, securPharm, and Pharmacode. Technical controls needed for FDA 21 CFR Part 11 validation, including secure user authentication and automatic audit trail generation, also are included.
Higher speeds, better clarity
Teledyne Dalsa, a Teledyne Technologies company and provider of machine vision technology, expanded its Genie TS camera series with new 2-megapixel and 4-megapixel monochrome models that reach speeds up to 76 frames per second (fps) in HD format. These new models are suitable for a wide range of inspection applications. Based on the CMOSIS imaging sensors CMV2000 and CMV4000, the new models are engineered to meet ever-increasing speed and image clarity requirements of machine vision. Features are easily accessible with Teledyne Dalsa’s advanced software tools or GigE Vision compliant third-party software. The cameras are designed to perform in extreme environments in temperatures from -20 C up to 60 C.
Vision standards improve connectivity
AIA, the global vision and imaging trade group with more than 330 member companies from 32 countries, released USB3 Vision v1.0 in January, after passing with unanimous approval from the AIA Technical Committee. Like all AIA standards, it is available free from the AIA website; licensing is required for those developing and market commercial products.
V1.1 of the Camera Link HS IP Core Solutions: The Camera Link HS Technical Committee released v1.0 of the IP Core Solutions for the M and X Protocol in May 2012. In March 2013, v1.1 makes the IP cores even easier to use. These IP cores will vastly reduce the time to market and the cost of support by giving a development team a ready-to-use reference implementation, saving as much as six months’ development time, AIA said. The Camera Link HS IP Core solution is a group of FPGA-ready cores implementing the message layer of the Camera Link HS standard. The solution provides cores for camera and frame grabber devices for the M and X protocols. AIA said it can be used on Altera and Xylinx FPGAs and can easily be extended to other FPGA technologies.
Pixel Format Naming Convention (PFNC) v1.1 has been released on the AIA website. The PFNC 1.0 was created in November 2011 by the GigE Vision committee to generalize the definition and layout of various pixel formats so they can be re-used by the various machine vision standards, AIA said. Version 1.1 introduces an appendix to list the recommended pixel format ID to be used as unique identifier for a given pixel format. These IDs are available as 32-bit and 16-bit values. This enables different camera interface standards to share the same values, simplifying software development. The appendix supports GigE Vision 2.0, USB3 Vision 1.0, and CoaXPress 1.0. PFNC 1.1 also adds some new pixel formats to support the USB3 Vision 1.0 specification, AIA said.
– Articles edited by Mark T. Hoske, content manager, CFE Media, Control Engineering, mhoske@cfemedia.com. See more Control Engineering machine vision articles at www.controleng.com/machinevision.
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