Image acquisition and storage

Abstract

As was explained in Chapter 3, the input for any vision-based sensing system is light intensity. The variation in light intensity over space or time provides information about the environment or product (Zuech and Miller, 1989). This chapter covers the various aspects of acquiring two-dimensional images and storing them for further processing. Although the hardware required to accomplish these tasks has become quite commonplace, the design of the image acquisition system should not be taken lightly. The quality and consistency of the acquired images have a dramatic impact on the level of difficulty that will be encountered in further processing, and many challenging image processing problems can be eliminated or at least minimized by careful detailed design of the image acquisition system.