vision builder

[stuart66]

In the geometric pattern matching tool, there is an algorithm to detect curved edges for the template.  I need to detect these curved edges exactly as it does in this, but not for pattern matching purposes.  When the edges are found, they are marked with a green line.  Is there a way for that picture to be saved in the program?

I am trying to detect and count small bright spot in a plastic film.  The problem is they are not necessarily a higher light intensity than other streaky parts of the film so simple thresholds to not differentiate.  The curved edge algorithm was successfully able to find the curved edges around the brights that I want to count, but I could not find a way to save the picture or count the edges. If the picture could be saved, the edges would be a different intensity and could then be easily counted.

Thanks,

Ian

[Eric_R]

Hi Ian

Pattern matching should return the location in x and y coordinates of the location where the match was found. As far as edge detection goes have you tried using IMAQ circular edge detection or edge detection along where you find this curve at? If you want to modify the image to leave the overlays present when you save you could try a merge overlays and then save the image.

[stuart66]

Eric,

Thank you for getting back to me.  I am not actually looking to match the pattern.  The bright spots that I am trying to identify and count are very small, 5-10 square pixels.  In a 3in by 4in area, there could be up to a hundred spots.  The straight line edge detections will pick up the two edges if you set the line directly through the spot, but can only identify edges along a single line.  The curve edge parameter in the geometric matching tool uses many line edges both vertically and horizontally, spaced out as specified to find the small curved edges that are created by the bright spots.  When you are editing the tool, the curve edges are shown on the picture, but this image cannot be logged.  The image is not actually an overlay, just an image you can see while editing the tool.  I can manually save the image while I am editing the tool, then pull the image from the file and count the curved edges.  I need a way to save that image automatically rather than having to "edit" the geometric matching tool to save the image.  This is something we would like our technicians to do one every roll of film we make to determine if there are too many bright spots or not.  We need the picture to be saved automatically so that we can simply run the program and it will return a count of the brights.

The shape detection tool in Vision Assistance also utilizes the same curve edge finding technique, but I am again faced with the same issue.  The image cannot be saved.  This tool does allow you to find and count shapes, but the minimun radius for locating circles and elipses is 3 pixels.  My bright spots are smaller than this.

Thanks again,

Ian

[Eric_R]

Hi Ian

Maybe you could attach a picture of what you are examining. Basically we are only using the pattern matching tool to highlight the small bright spots with the green circles that form upon the region of interests in vision assistant and then having a technician analyze the picture to count the bright spots. Are you using Vision Assistant or LabVIEW to create this code? From the sounds of things I would set a threshold on this image and remove the bright pixel values you are using then count them with our binary functions and you would not even need to have a technician take time to look at the image.