Abstract: An improved vision system is provided for identifying and assessing features of an article. Systems are provided for developing feature assessment programs, which, when deployed, may inspect parts and/or provide position information for guiding automated manipulation of such parts. The improved system is easy to use and facilitates the development of versatile and flexible article assessment programs. In one aspect, the system comprises a set of step tools from which a set of step objects is instantiated. The set of step tools may comprise machine vision step objects that comprise routines for processing an image of the article to provide article feature information. A control flow data structure and a data flow data structure may each be provided. The control flow data structure charts a flow of control among the step objects.

Abstract: A machine vision system for finding an angle object orientation, or other characteristic, of an object in an image. The system determines the boundary pixels, determines the segment orientation angles associated with each successive segment of n boundary pixels, assigns a weight to each angle, generates a histogram of the angles according to their weights, normalizes the histogram to an angle range covering 90.degree., and generates a signal representing the angle corresponding to a selected peak in the histogram. In one embodiment, the system interpolates between neighboring pixels across the boundary to obtain a grey-scale boundary of sub-pixel accuracy.