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: Determining the position of a generally rectangular device is achieved by performing subsampling of image data, thresholding of the subsampled data, extraction of boundary features based on the output of the thresholding, calculation of correspondence between extracted boundary features and the generally rectangular device, and a final fit against a model of the generally rectangular device. Correspondence between the boundary features of the image and the generally rectangular device is performed by locating points in the extracted boundary feature which may correspond to corners of the generally rectangular device, removing those points which correspond to known objects other than the generally rectangular device, removing those points likely to belong to unknown objects, and fitting the points to an input model of the generally rectangular device to determine its position.