Fundamentals of machine vision lighting

The advances in machine vision technology have been substantial in recent years, with the introduction of faster, more powerful processors and the improvements in sensor technology (i.e., solid state cameras). One area that is often neglected in machine vision applications is lighting considerations. Often, complicated and expensive hardware and software are used to solve a vision problem where some attention to the “front end” (lighting and optics) would have solved the problem. The objective of this article is to familiarize the reader with some of the techniques used to solve machine vision lighting problems with references made to real applications