Dalsa, a provider of machine vision technology, has advanced the colour capability of its Sapera Essential software for machine vision applications. Sapera Essential (Edition 01/2009) is a cost-effective machine vision software toolkit that bundles board-level acquisition and control with advanced image processing capability. It is intended to deliver the functionality needed to design, develop and deploy high-performance machine vision applications, while at the same time significantly lowering deployment costs.
The software provides improved colour capability including a series of optimised colour space conversion functions supporting RGB, YUV, HSV and LAB formats. Split and merge functions are also available for plane-by-plane processing. A set of basic image processing operators such as thresholding, histogram, projections, statistics, clustering, and colour reduction are supplied. A colour correction algorithm trained from a standardised colour chart can be used to compensate for different lighting conditions. Finally, a colour classifier feature is included, trained from a series of colour samples and used to separate colour regions of an image. Coupled with a blob analyser it is used to inspect colour images in areas such as food inspection and pharmaceutical.
Hardware independent, Sapera Essential offers users a single API and a comprehensive feature set, including: acquisition control, image processing primitive, blob analysis, area and shaped based pattern matching, colour, barcode (linear/1D and matrix/2D codes), OCR and lens correction tools with easy-to-use application development and evolution tools.
The software includes support for the Windows 64-bit and .NET platforms.
