Microscan Visionscape FrontRunner, User Manual

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Chapter 1
Visionscape® Overview
1-8 Visionscape FrontRunner™ User’s Manual v4.1.3, April 2012
complexity of locating features in an image. It is well suited where an
object reference must be found before it is inspected or gauged.
When building a Job in FrontRunner™ (for more information, see Chapter
2), you can insert an IntelliFind™ tool by selecting it from the Insert Tool
dialog box (Image/PreProcessing tab). You can always insert and use
IntelliFind™ in a Job, even if a key cannot be found to unlock it. In this
case, IntelliFind™ runs in demonstration mode, with recurring messages
requesting that you insert the key. You can make changes to tryout the
Job, but you cannot save the Job to disk. When connected to a VS-1
Smart Camera IntelliFind™ model, no hardware dongle is required to
tryout the Job. Essentially, the VS-1 Smart Camera acts as a hardware
dongle, but only for that VS-1 Smart Camera currently selected in
FrontRunner™ (focused device).
Note: You cannot upgrade a non-IntelliFind™ VS-1 Smart Camera in the
field.
Visionscape
®
Software Structure and Concepts
Steps and Trees
A Step represents a piece of vision functionality in Visionscape
®
.
Applications are a collection of steps. To provide order to this collection,
the steps are arranged in a Tree. The Tree represents not only the
containment of a set of steps, but also represents a data connection
between these steps. In other words, a step can receive a set of data
inputs, act on this data, and produce a set of data outputs. The tree
represents the connection of particular data outputs to data inputs.
The most common piece of data to be passed from one step to another is
a buffer. A buffer is a piece of memory that contains image data.
In Figure 1-5, a Snapshot generates a buffer that is passed to the Sobel
Filter. The Sobel Filter then executes a Sobel algorithm on the buffer and
generates a new buffer, which is passed to the Edge Tool. The Edge Tool
finds an edge on that buffer and reports a result. A step that generates