The industrial application of computer vision: a research group´s perspective

The National Engineering Laboratory has supported a programme of research and development in computer vision for over a decade. Activities undertaken within that time include the design of component recognition and location systems for robotic guidance and the establishment of an automated visual inspection cell for investigating industrial quality assurance problems. More recently the work has been extended to include projects on the application of transputer-based parallel processing techniques within computer vision. Significant work is also carried out in the development of active stereo techniques for the derivation of 3D coordinate information. The article discusses three particular projects: a nuclear fuel subassembly dismantling vision system; a system for 3D imaging of faces, especially mouths and jaws, for planning corrective surgery; and the development of training courses at the Vision Technology Transfer Centre