Educational experiments in machine vision

We present a set of four educational experiments in machine vision. These were designed to run on low-cost hardware which is yet powerful enough to serve in genuine industrial applications of machine vision. The experiments introduce students to thresholding, connected component analysis, Hough transforms, stereo vision, and color coordinate systems. The programming involved is close enough to the hardware to expose students to real-time processing techniques and prepares them to tackle the type of problems they will face in field applications of machine vision. The experiments are: locate coins in an image, identify their denominations, and count the amount of money present; extract the straight edges of a cube by the Hough transform technique; extract three-dimensional (3-D) information from left and right images of the same cube; and transform color images from RGB to HSI coordinates and visually assess the results