Colour vision sensor

The FZ3 colour vision sensor, providing true colour technology, high dynamic range and five million pixels resolution, is designed to make it possible to automate inspection of low-contrast colour objects at high speed with reliable results. Omron’s Advanced Real Color Sensing (ARCS) engine captures and processes 16.77 million colours, approaching human colour perception, and is claimed to outperform systems that use monochrome or false-colour contrast conversion and analysis methods.

The five-megapixel camera enables more precise inspections by measuring high-resolution images taken by the camera with an advanced image-processing algorithm.

The conventional difficulty in setting and adjusting lighting conditions is ascribed to the limited dynamic ranges of cameras. FZ3 has achieved a high dynamic range of up to 5000:1, to reduce the dependency on lighting systems.

The vision sensor’s wider fields of view enable inspections for whole workpieces. Wider fields of view can be achieved by synthesising the images of two or more cameras. Each synthesised image can be inspected as a single image.

Specular reflection that causes halation can be removed by analysing the wavelength of the light. Halation-free images can be generated even if workpieces are positioned irregularly.

The FZ3 also includes a fringe-killer filter, which eliminates the background patterns that disturb the detection of defects, for more stable inspections.

The FZ3 controller comes built into a touch-screen LCD monitor to reduce panel space, or in a conventional box-type unit. Images and tool sets are presented on screen for easy drag-and-drop set-up.