Description
LumiScan Object Finder locates known objects inside a camera image by their shape. You describe an object with one or more small pictures of it - its templates - and the application reports where that object appears in a larger image, how well it matched, and which of your pictures it matched.
Typical uses are presence and count checks, position feedback for a robot pick, sorting mixed parts on a belt, and orientation checks before an assembly step.
How it recognises an object
Matching is done on the outline of the object - the direction in which brightness changes across its edges - rather than on the brightness values themselves. That has two practical consequences.
It is tolerant of lighting and surface finish. A part that is shiny in one cell and matte in another, or lit from a different angle, still presents the same outline. Intensity based matching struggles here.
It is not tolerant of rotation and size by itself. The application does not turn or rescale your template looking for a fit. Instead, an object is described by several templates - one per orientation or working distance you want to recognise. Four templates recognise four orientations.
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This is the main difference from LumiScan Template Finder, which correlates brightness and does search a range of scales and rotations, reporting an oriented box. Object Finder is faster and far more robust to lighting, and reports an axis-aligned rectangle plus the name of the object found. Choose Object Finder when lighting or finish varies and the orientations are known; choose Template Finder when the angle is continuous and unknown. |
What the application does
The application provides two operations.
Creating a template cuts a rectangular region out of a live camera image and saves it as another view of an object. This is how you teach an object from the real camera, in the real lighting, at the real working distance - no file transfer and no image editor needed. See Creating an Object.
Finding an object searches a live camera image and reports every occurrence it finds. See Finding an Object.
Both read the image from another application’s Data Layer image node - normally LumiScan Cam Driver - at the moment they are called, so they always work on the current image.
Where the images come from
The application does not talk to a camera itself. It reads an image node published by another application on the Data Layer, given as an address, for example:
hdvisionsystems/lumiscan-cam-driver/camera1/output/image
The node must publish data, width, height and pixel-type, which is what LumiScan Cam Driver
provides.
Objects and modules
An object is something you want to find - a screw, a bracket - described by its templates. Objects belong to the whole application, so an object taught once can be found by every module.
A module is one configured instance of the search: its own camera address, its own settings and its own results, at its own Data Layer address. One installation can run several modules to watch several cameras at once. One license covers ten modules. See Module Management.