IMAQ Vision Builder - The National Instruments Vision Software - Environment for prototyping vision applications

Vision Assistant
Interactive software for vision application

Vision Assistant is an interactive prototyping and "what-if" environment for prototyping vision applications. Vision Assistant allows you to learn easily image processing and investigate vision software strategies without programming. Unlike any other interactive vision development tool, Vision Assistant generates a text description - a recipe of the machine vision and image processing functions that provides a guide for developing applications with IMAQ Vision in LabVIEW, BridgeVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, and Component Works with Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C.
Vision Assistant makes vision easy enough to use so that a whole new class of users has access to the benefits that vision and image processing can offer. NI Vision Assistant can automatically generate a LabVIEW block diagram that contains the same functionality as the series of operations you prototyped in NI Vision Assistant. You can integrate the diagram into your automation or production test application, which can include motion control, instrument control, and data acquisition.	Download a demo
The National Instruments Vision Development Module is for scientists and engineers who develop machine vision and scientific imaging applications. The new package Vision Development Module contains: IMAQ Vision for LabVIEW or LabWindows, Vision Assistant and NI-IMAQ 3.0.

Quickly Explore the Possibilities with Vision Assistant

Building a vision application often involves clever experimentation. With Vision Assistant, you can:
- Test different processing strategies, as well as test the strategy on variety of images
- Quickly and easily explore "what-if" conditions
- Immediately visualize the result of changing an image processing control parameter
- Test an image processing function or a series of functions
- See the result of each step without programming

Accelerate Application Development

The result of an interactive development session is an Vision Assistant script that can be run again and again, or run in batch mode on hundreds of images within the Vision Assistant environment. In addition, Vision Assistant outputs builder file, which is a text listing of IMAQ Vision machine vision function calls with parameters to guide you in developing custom machine vision applications optimized for speed in LabVIEW, BridgeVIEW, LabWindows/CVI and ComponentWorks with Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C. The software functions are standard vision functions from IMAQ Vision machine vision and image processing software from National Instruments.

Prototype for Many Development Environments

Vision Assistant creates a detailed "builder" file with a list of each functions from the prototyping session. This builder file gives a detailed description of the image processing function and parameters for each function call. This builder file serves as a development guide with National Instruments IMAQ Vision image processing and machine vision software. Using IMAQ Vision and the builder file, you can easily incorporate vision into custom applications that also require data acquisition, motion control, or instrument control, with LabVIEW, BridgeVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, and ComponentWorks with Visual Basic and Visual C.

Vision Assistant Machine Vision and Image Processing Functionality

Vision Assistant includes the following image processing and machine vision features.

Inspection
Use the shape and gray-scale correlation tools to prototype alignment, measurement, and inspection applications. Inspect for missing parts in mechanical assembly verification applications. Calculate distances and angles between components and markings to ensure they are manufactured within tolerance. Train on a object such as a part and then search for repeated appearances of that part using fast normalized gray-scale correlation or binary shape matching functions. Use tolerance levels to filter, reject, or accept features. Use binary shape matching to find objects of the same shape even if their size and orientation differ. Specify search parameters and constraints to limit and accelerate your search.

Measurement and Gauging
Use gauging, caliper, measurement, and edge-detection functions to automatically locate edges and to measure distance and angles between edges, points, and parts. Measure from point to point using the line profile and gauging tools. In your inspection application, measure critical distances and compare to a tolerance; then reject the flawed products. Calculate edge distance measurements with subpixel accuracy.

vision assistant

Blob Analysis and Morphology
Use the blob analysis function to analyze connected pixels (blob) in an image. Calculate area, perimeter, center of mass, moment of inertia, orientation, width, height, and bounding rectangle on binary particles, cells, and objects. Measure more than 50 different binary features for an object. To make counting and measuring easier, change the shapes of blobs with morphological functions. Erode, dilate, fill holes, reject objects on border, remove blobs, and so on.

vision assistant

Image Enhancement and Quantitative Analysis
Interactively sharpen, smooth, enhance edges, and remove noise from images. Analyze image pixel intensities graphically with line profile and histograms. Improve brightness and contrast and apply gamma correction. Apply custom spatial filters or morphological structuring elements with variable size and variable number of kernels per filter.

Color
Histograph, threshold, and convert color images from one color model to another. Operate on red, green, blue (RGB), or hue, saturation, luminance (HSL) images. Separate any of the color planes for processing.

vision assitant

Frequency Domain Processing
Perform FFTs and remove noise in the frequency domain.

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