Amplify Your Machine Vision with WenglorTPL Lighting Solutions - from AutomationDirect

Choosing the right lighting for machine vision is critical. Illumination choices can be challenging to get perfect. That’s why we now offer several lighting options from Wenglor TPL. You can choose from a selection of bar lights, ring lights, back lights, and flat dome lights. These provide the proper amount of contrast, brightness, and uniformity to an imaging surface to provide a good image of the code or object. To correctly choose the lights needed for your applications, it is important to understand the goals and principles of machine vision lighting. Machine vision lighting has 3 main goals: Contrast, homogeneity, and brightness. Contrast is the priority goal for any machine vision lighting system. Detection is easier when the contrast is higher. Most camera vision applications are in monochrome, so high contrast makes image processing easier. The best contrast is achieved with the right balance of homogeneity and brightness. Homogeneity is also known as uniformity. The light needs to illuminate the whole field uniformly so there are no hot spots and dark spots. High homogeneity allows for better accuracy. Brightness is essential in machine vision lighting. System designers can create more robust systems using brighter LEDs and reduce motion blur as a result. These new lights from Wenglor TPL are engineered to run efficiently while giving off maximum output. What about the ambient light in your application? Ambient light varies by location so system designers need to keep this under consideration when developing a machine vision lighting system. Ambient light can come from overhead, but there are situations where it might come from a window, opening a door, or even a reflective surface. The best way to compensate for ambient light might be to increase the brightness or use a shroud around the inspection area. When setting up your system it’s important to remember these 4 principles: brightfield, darkfield, low angle, and backlight. Brightfield is an angle of incidence between 0 and 30 degrees and is the easiest for us to understand because it’s how we, as humans, see the world. This isn’t well suited for shiny objects. A dark field is an angle of incidence between 80 and 90 degrees. It will generally bring a high contrast to the edges. If your parts are shiny, a diffused lighting source works best, and a narrow beam works best for parts that are not. Low-angle lighting has an angle of incidence between 30 and 80 degrees with the lighting source placed between the bright and dark fields so that the user can take advantage of both methods. This type of lighting is great for intricate tasks like engraving. Backlighting is a method of placing a light behind the object. For the best results, it is important that the light is bigger than the field of view and sources should be highly diffused for high uniformity. Backlighting also makes it possible to see a silhouette. For information about our Wenglor TPL vision lighting solutions, please visit us at AutomationDirect.com. Click here to learn more about our Wenglor TPL vision lighting solutions. Click here to see more videos from AutomationDirect.