Intelligent Image Processing

Abstract

Simply reading the previous chapter, or any other text on image processing, does not, on its own, equip a person to design an effective industrial vision system. A person cannot examine a picture by eye and decide what algorithms are necessary for filtering, analysing and measuring it. Proof of this is not hard to find: try it, but be prepared for disappointment! In the past, many people have adopted this approach, only to discover later that, what they were convinced would be an effective image processing algorithm, was not reliable and effective in practice, or did not work at all. Inspection of an object or scene by eye, followed by introspective self-analysis is now totally discredited as a method of choosing image processing algorithms for machine vision systems. Over the last two decades, this has gradually been accepted as one of the central tenets of the machine vision systems development process.