Low-cost webcam & machine vision?

[JK]

Hi!

As a Labview-newbie I'm wondering if I can use any low-cost
USB-webcams (Creative, Logitec etc.) for a simple machine-vision
solution (grabbing & some simple analyzes). Any ideas / experiences ?

JK

[wiebe@CARYA]

Hi,

I don't know about the hardware side (camera), but from the software side
you can grab a picture from a Video For Windows device. Most (all?)webcams
use this mechanism. Using overlay from LV is more difficult (for viewing the
pictures, rather then grabbing).

A typical webcam resolution is to low to do any serius analyzes. And it's
not just the pixel resolution (widthXheight) that mathers, but also to
signal/noise ratio, blurring, smearing, etc. that limits the use of webcams
for vision. If you let us know what you plan to analyze maybe we can share
info on this.

Regards,

Wiebe.


"JK" wrote in message
news:544d2e3.0301160112.6c1a62fb@posting.google.com...
> Hi!
>
> As a Labview-newbie I'm wondering if I can use any low-cost
>
USB-webcams (Creative, Logitec etc.) for a simple machine-vision
> solution (grabbing & some simple analyzes). Any ideas / experiences ?
>
> JK

[cld]

JK,

If you are planning on doing post processing, you can use the USB camera's utility to save images to file and then open them in LabVIEW for processing. Or if you are looking to actually acquire images in LabVIEW, Inventeering has developed an application that will allow you to do this. Below is a link to an example document on our site concerning this app.
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/explprog.nsf/6c163603265406328625682a006ed37d/a2394a482c4ff65486256bce006a00ec?OpenDocument

Best Regards,
Chris
NI Applications Engineer

[Irene He]

Hi JK,
It depends on what you want to do with the machine vision. I have used
USB and firewire camera, certainly firewire camera has much better
image quality than USB, I would think firewire camera is enough for
some kind of analysis that you want to do. And it does not cost too
much (I saw somewhere in the web about $150US), at least much cheaper
than the expensive analog camera plus frame grabber which usually cost
over $1000US. If you want to try out, I've created a LabVIEW vision
library for firewire and USB camera, it's called IVision, it also
includes image display functions, manipulation and some processing.
Check out:
http://www.geocities.com/irene_he/IVision.html
It's still in the trial state right now. I hope I will get full
version done soon.

Irene




jussi.kiviniitty@pp.nic.fi (JK) wrote in message news:<544d2e3.0301160112.6c1a62fb@posting.google.com>...
> Hi!
>
> As a Labview-newbie I'm wondering if I can use any low-cost
> USB-webcams (Creative, Logitec etc.) for a simple machine-vision
> solution (grabbing & some simple analyzes). Any ideas / experiences ?
>
> JK

[Joey Oravec]

Also, I have had ok luck with the consumer grade digital cameras. Of course
these are only suitable for certian tasks, but...

They have specific SDK's for the logitech quickcam, canon, and olympus
digital cameras that I've seen so far. Of course this involves making VI
wrappers for the librarys or activeX controls, but it can work in some
situations!

Logitech online download:
http://developer.logitech.com/index.cfm?page=partners/home&CRID=948&countryi
d=2&languageid=1
Canon SLOW mailing:
http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/customer/develop1.html
Olympus FAST mailing: http://developer.olympus.com

Good luck! I've obtained all of these in the past, and tried them with
labview.

-joey

"Irene He" wrote in message
news:d5c38d1c.0301161
834.203c96f5@posting.google.com...
> Hi JK,
> It depends on what you want to do with the machine vision. I have used
> USB and firewire camera, certainly firewire camera has much better
> image quality than USB, I would think firewire camera is enough for
> some kind of analysis that you want to do. And it does not cost too
> much (I saw somewhere in the web about $150US), at least much cheaper
> than the expensive analog camera plus frame grabber which usually cost
> over $1000US. If you want to try out, I've created a LabVIEW vision
> library for firewire and USB camera, it's called IVision, it also
> includes image display functions, manipulation and some processing.
> Check out:
> http://www.geocities.com/irene_he/IVision.html
> It's still in the trial state right now. I hope I will get full
> version done soon.
>
> Irene
>
>
>
> jussi.kiviniitty@pp.nic.fi (JK) wrote in message
news:<544d2e3.0301160112.6c1a62fb@posting.google.com>...
> > Hi!
> >
> > As a Labview-newbie I'm wonderin
g if I can use any low-cost
> > USB-webcams (Creative, Logitec etc.) for a simple machine-vision
> > solution (grabbing & some simple analyzes). Any ideas / experiences ?
> >
> > JK