'Spot-It' Smart Cameras

'Spot-It' is the smart camera from the award winning electronics and software manufacturers Soliton. Spot-It comes under the category of machine vision cameras as they could be used to assure error-less manufacturing units and defect free products. The concept of machine vision cameras it self is revolutionary. If attached to an assembling unit or production unit, these cameras can detect the minutest errors and thus operate machines to reject the product or mend them. Spot-It is a compact, rugged, standalone Machine Vision system, which is user programmable and also available at a comparably cheaper prize.

Soliton is an Indian company with branches in US and in different metro cities of India. Soliton is exclusively into the production of wide range of machine vision products. They conceptualize and materialise various products for manufacturing industry to automobile visual inspection. The products go beyond all the quality tests and maintain six-sigma/zero-defect quality levels. Machine vision cameras perform the function of capturing an image and transferring it in real-time to an external processor, typically a PC, for image processing. These cameras have many specialized features that make them suitable for industrial inspection like triggered image acquisition, software control of all the camera settings for image acquisition, industry standard interface for image transfer to the PC, rugged mounting provisions, and tested for operation in industrial environments. Soliton has developed machine vision cameras with all of the major technologies used in the industry - CCD and CMOS sensors, Line Scan and Area Scan image formats, Color and Monochrome outputs, and Camera Link and IEEE 1394 interfaces.

Each one of our Machine Vision Cameras has an on-board FPGA that can be programmed to handle basic level of on-board image processing. The smart camera acquires an image either continuously or upon receiving a trigger, processes that image using an algorithm that is pre-programmed into the FPGA, and then performs an action based on the image analysis. The electronic analysis report could then be used to actuate a pneumatic value or a mechanical device to take the necessary action like rejecting or ejecting a bad part from a conveyor. Or it could be to send the processed information as a message through the serial port, or send the event-triggered image for storage in an external storage system like a PC or a Digital Video Recorder.

The new line of smart cameras was released recently by Soliton and the new ones contain an onboard DSP which can be user programmed using the Soliton Vision Library, a comprehensive image processing library optimized for the specific DSP used in our camera.

The easy usable cameras can address a wide range of applications like Presence / Absence Verification, Position / Orientation / Alignment Verification, Non-contact Poke Yoke, Dimension Check, Sorting by Color / Size / Shape, Color Code Verification, Inspection of Labels / Packaging, Surface Inspection for Defects like Dents, Scratches, etc... Spot-It can address a wide variety of Machine Vision applications in various industries. Spot-It can ensure that defects are detected before the product is sent to the next stage or shipped out of the factory. With Spot-It, your dependence on finding and training good manual inspectors will be a problem of the past.

The software that is supplied with Spot-It, enables the user to program custom image processing routines in no time, using a simple configuration type interface. Therefore, no programming language needs to be learnt in order to program Spot-It. Soliton's Configurable Vision System, 'Spot-It', is positioned uniquely in the market because it in price it is close to a pattern matching system but in programming flexibility, it is closer to a high end programmable vision system.