Increasing Software Productivity of Pipeline Image Processing Architectures in Visual Inspection Applications

Pipeline image processing systems are increasingly being used in industrial vision systems, in particular in manufacture visual inspection. There has been little work done in the study of the appropriate software environment for rapid program development for these machines. In this paper, an approach to improve software programmability of these systems was proposed. The software features reflecting the hardware capabilities as well as the nature of image processing applications were discussed. A preprocessor was developed to support the high level programming environment and the abstract data structures. The preprocessor also analyzed the image processing tasks expressed as expressions and generate the hardware setup and connections necessary for multipass operations through the pipeline processor. A prototype implementation of the preprocessor and an example were also discussed.