Advantages of special lenses for top and side inspection vs multi-camera systems

Many machine vision applications such as OCR/barcode reading on bottles and containers, or defect detection inside threaded bores require inspecting features randomly located both on the part outer or inner sides, and on the top and bottom surfaces. This paper describes the advantages of using special optics designed for 360° inspection (either using a pericentric design or various lens/mirror combinations) versus multi-camera systems or line-scan imaging.