A common question that I often get is why can't we use consumer grade cameras or surveillance
cameras, And why do we need specialized industrial
cameras for Machine Vision projects.
Hi, my name is Raghava Kashyapa, CEO of Qualitas Technologies
and this video I'm going to dive into into the details of what constitutes the key
difference between a consumer camera and specialized industrial
cameras.
At the heart of it all, both cameras, really operate on a CMOS, what is commonly a CMOS
sensor technology.
A CMOS sensor is responsible for converting light energy of photons into
electric energy or electrons, which is how digital pixels or images are formed in pixels.
Now, the differences really are surrounding all the things that
happened in the acquisition process.
So, even though the sensor technology which is perhaps in your cell phone
or your web camera or surveillance camera is very similar to what you
would see in industrial cameras, the differences are in a couple of
different areas.
One, it's the housing.
Often times, Industrial cameras are very miniaturized so that they fit into small places.
Surveillance cameras, On the other hand, are often bulky with housing that is suitable
for all vendor conditions, especially for the outdoor.
The other common difference is in the acquisition frame rate.
So with surveillance camera, the purpose of surveillance and other consumer grade cameras
would be to visualize a video or some still images.
The human eye can differentiate frame rates of up to 60 frames per
second, which is often good enough as a temporal resolution
When you're looking at the videos in a sequence.
But in the case of industrial use, you would often can come across high
speed application lines, which demand higher frame-rate often in the
hundreds of frames per second.
The third difference is in the programmatic access to controls within
the camera.
So with industrial vision, it's fully automated in the sense that you would have some
upstream, or downstream automation, which is integrated with your camera technology.
So you often have external triggers, which pro-grammatically acquired
images, or you may also have outputs which programmatically defined,
certain signals which can communicate with external devices like PLC's and controllers.
With consumer cameras, these are generally absent.
Another key difference is the range in which you actually have sensors as well as resolutions.
With surveillance or other kind of consumer-grade cameras, the purpose again is to
visualize and see how it looks to the human eye, but with Industrial cameras it's not
how it looks in the human eye but how clear the features
or the features of contrast of Interest are to
the image processing software.
And that's when things like different Quantum efficiencies, different
sensor sizes, different pixel sizes, and even differences like the
shutter types being Global shutter, rolling shutters
make a key difference in acquiring quality images which are clear to
the software but not just to the human eye.
So these are some of the differences and I hope I've been able to convey
some points which justify the use of industrial camera.
And, the next time you're going in for a Machine Vision project, do keep
these in mind.
It may seem that a consumer grade camera could be
well suited for your application, in which case, to go ahead, but it's these differences
which often makes the difference between success and failure of
project, in which case it's better to go with an industrial camera.
Thanks.