An in-camera data stream processing system for defect detection in web inspection tasks

One of the aims of industrial machine vision is to develop computer and electronic systems to replace human vision in quality control of industrial production. Traditionally these systems consist of a line scan camera, host computer, frame grabber and one or more dedicated processing boards. In this paper we discuss the development of a new integrated design environment, developed for real-time defect detection, that eliminates the need for an external frame grabber and other associated host computer peripheral systems. The processing board contains a reconfigurable field programmable gate array (FPGA) inside a DALSA CCD camera. The FPGA is directly connected to the video data-stream and outputs data to a low bandwidth output bus. The system is targeted for web inspection but has the potential for broader application areas. We describe and show test results of the in-camera prototype system board ana-discuss some of the algorithms currently simulated and implemented for web inspection applications. (C) 1999 Academic Press.