Fast signal processing hardware for industrial inspection

Visual-based systems designed for industrial inspection must conform to requirements of cost, reliability, and totally unattended operation substantially different from those of related fields that use similar technologies, such as military image processing systems, video special effects systems, computers, and camcorders. But much of the high-speed image-processing hardware developed for these fields can also be applied to industrial inspection problems. The author outlines the constraints imposed on typical industrial systems and gives two extended examples to illustrate these ideas. Both examples make use of commercially available pipelined image processing hardware. The same hardware can also be used for many 1-D signal processing applications, such as finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, wavelet and Fourier transforms, correlation, etc.<>