When Vision Assistant steps are converted to LabVIEW VI, the overlay of result (i.e. edge detect, particle counts) is lost.

Adding overlay function on VI requires not only LabVIEW skills, but Vision knowledge due to image memory handling.

So it'd be nice to have an option to keep the overlay functionality on Vision Assistant even when converting to LabVIEW VI to have a smooth transition.

Ryuji Kuwajima

<rant>

A user of mine who had tried a software I had released as an executable using the trial license offered by NI when first installing the Vision Development Module RTE, decided to go ahead and purchase a single user license from NI to be able to continue using it (note: I don' t get a dime from this transaction and in fact I would argue that being a research only tool, there should be no "Deployment License Fee" charged to any user, but this is another topic).

The user called NI, who told her that the product would ship in 3 days from now. The user reported this to me, and I immediately called NI to figure out what was going on. After all, the deployment license is a simple license number and there is no need to ship anything, since the RTE can be downloaded for free on NI's website.

Well, things are different at NI.

Yes, the website confirms that a deployment license doesn't need any delivery ("no media" is the only choice on the product page: http://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/select/vision-development-module). But still, when you purchase a license on Tuesday, it only "ships" on Friday.

I had to talk to two NI employees before I could get to the point where I was offered to get a "trial license extension" for my user (but no admission that the fact that a software license needs 3 days to be generated is backwards).

I certainly will not go through this a second time, and will clearly spell out the antiquated process that any potential user of my software will need to go through, should they desire to purchase a license...

<end of rant>

Idea: Make it simple to get a vision development module deployment license (as in quick email delivery shortly after online purchase).

With the release of LV 2017 and therefore Vision 2017 I expected the 2GB limit to be gone.

Unfortunately and with great diappointment I have found out that this was not the case and it's still not possible to create or handle image files greater than 2GB even in LV 64bit 2017.

Latest linear image sensors can go up to 32.000 pixels (per line and per channel) and we currently use a 16K sensor in our camera and easily can exceed the 2GB limit when we scan long materials specially if 16bit precision is required and RGB color is also needed. This means that we had to implement several tricks in order to break down the image size (we process each RGB color layer as a separate image file and divide the image in several chunks) but we are still anyway experiencing many bottlenecks and are frustrated in the software development because we cannot use many of the exhisting Vision tools that are limited to 2GB. And of course VISION/IMAQ libraries cannot handle image processing when image information is distributed into different images and therefore we had to write our own libraries (even for image viewing) so as to handle the images properly. 

Furthermore, despite the TIFF format is limited to 4GB (not 2 GB) it's relatively easy to split the image file into separate TIFF files while it's not easy to handle or process image data in separate chunks or channels. Furthermore there are also other image formats that allows for very large file sizes (i.e. BigTIFF which is extremely easy to implement as it's only a 64bit extension of the currently 32bit limit in the TIFF format).

So my suggestion is: to break the 2GB limit and finally allow handling very large image files directly into Labview and the Vision libraries !!!