Component based software design and development of froth flotation visual monitoring system

Machine vision based froth flotation process monitoring and control aims at achieving automatic monitoring and intelligent evaluation of the production conditions of the whole flotation circuit through building the intelligent image analysis software platform, so as to further realize the optimal control of flotation production process. The froth visual monitoring system has high demand on real-time, stability, reusability and maintainability of the system software, however, the traditional software development methods have long development cycle and poor system portability, and higher cost in the software maintenance. Even worse, the quasi visual monitoring systems used in different flotation plants are all difficult to achieve the effective reuse of the existing system software via the simple configuration. In this paper, taking the copper flotation visual monitoring system development as an example, we develop a reusable component base in advance and consequently the forth flotation visual monitoring system software are successfully developed with low-cost and high-efficiency by using component-based software design method to make the software system modular into multiple independent components on the base of the reusable theory and component technology of software development. Since the components have the merits of adaptability, portability and so on, the presented software development method well meets the demands of the industrial monitoring system on stability, reusability and maintainability. As a result, the efficiency of the software development has been effectively improved, besides, the cost of the system software maintenance declines and the robustness of the system software is proved to be enhanced.