Development of Ultralow-Cost Machine Vision System

Abstract

This paper reports on the development of a low-cost machine vision inspection system to promote the wide employment of the system and foster further quality improvements in automobile manufacturing. The machine vision system consists of a camera that takes images of an inspection target, lighting to ensure appropriate illuminance, and a controller that analyzes the images and gives inspection results. By optimizing the performance and using free software, we succeeded in the development of an ultralow-cost machine vision system for one tenth of the cost of commercially available factory automation machine vision systems. The development and results are introduced in this paper. The applicability of the ultralow-cost machine vision system platform to applications other than inspection is also discussed.