Flexible and Transportable Illumination Control System for Machine Vision Applications

During the development of machine vision setups for industrial applications, namely automatic visual inspection systems, the type of required lighting and correct illumination position and intensity are often not known in advance. In order to solve a specific machine vision task, an engineer needs to propose and implement a suitable image processing algorithm and design the accompanying lighting system. Testing different illumination concepts, especially "in the field", using off-the-shelf lighting systems is time consuming. The paper presents a custom-made, cost effective, transportable and flexible system which may be used for testing different illumination techniques and simultaneously control multiple lighting modules. In addition to the hardware part, the developed software used for control the system is presented in the paper. The proposed device usefulness is demonstrated by solving a suitable multi-light digital image processing task.