Automatic sensor and light source positioning for machine vision

The authors discuss an optimization approach to automatic sensor and light source positioning for a machine vision task where geometric measurement and/or object verification is important. The goal of the vision task is assumed to be specified in terms of edge visibility. There are two types of edge visibility: geometric edge visibility tells how much of the given edge is not occluded, and photometric visibility tells how much of the given edge has enough contrast to be detected in the image. A heuristic optimality criterion for the optimal sensor and light source position is defined in terms of these two edge visibilities. A preliminary experiment has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the optimization approach. The result shows that the optimization problem formulated can be solved by mathematical programming techniques