High-performance vision systems

Changes in production processes and special requirements for quality and resource efficiency are driving the development of innovative inspection approaches. When it comes to inspecting surface features at highest inspection speeds and with greatest reliability for even difficult material properties, AIT is ahead of the game. At the Optical & Digital Document Security (ODDS) conference in Vienna and the Control  in Stuttgart, the AIT Center for Vision Automation Control presented its latest systems for optical quality inspection. 

The Hotel Savoyen in the revitalized building of the former Imperial and Royal Court Printing Office in Vienna's 3rd district provided a suitable backdrop for this year's Optical & Digital Document Security (ODDS) conference. It is THE international conference for physical, digital and virtual document security (e.g. banknotes, passports, ID cards, etc.). "We presented a novel high-speed 3D imaging system perfectly suited for microscopic inline inspection of security features. This innovative approach achieves a depth accuracy of 2µm and a lateral scanning of 700nm/pixel at an acquisition speed of 15mm/s," explains Laurin Ginner, who is involved in research on 3D security feature detection using high-speed inline computational microscopy.

The AIT presentation at the Control, the international trade fair for quality assurance in Stuttgart, focused on the high-speed 3D inspection of demanding surfaces. The research group presented xposure:photometry at the Special Show Contactless Measuring Technology / Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The fast 3D surface scanner was developed for reliable surface defect detection of moving objects. "xposure:photometry can be used for industrial inline inspection but also for inspection of infrastructure like rails. The scanner combines very fast photometric stereo imaging (PS) with a smart camera to highlight even the smallest 3D surface defects despite high inspection speed and to distinguish them from pseudo defects such as dirt in a process reliable way. The photometric processing of the image sequences takes place directly on the camera's FPGA, which means that no additional processing unit is required to calculate the surface normals," says Petra Thanner, an high-performance vision systems expert at AIT.