Cognex Corporation

Steven Mark Rosenthal

William M Silver

Jean-Pierre Schott

Robert Anthony Wolff

A method and apparatus for creating a unified command structure for machine vision systems by defining a command class for each action capable of being executed in the machine vision system; establishing a data translator object for parameter data used by each command; associating each command class with an execution member corresponding to each action; associating a command class with a data member corresponding to the parameter data; and pre-instantiating a command object corresponding to the command class; at runtime, and upon receipt of a command identifier, the present invention locates the command object corresponding to the command identifier; associates the data translator object with actual parameter data; causes the object to establish the object's data members; and calls the object's execution member function to perform such actions as are indicated by its command class definition.

Method and apparatus for extensible command structure for machine vision

A coprocessor in an image processing system is coupled to the bus to which a CPU and RAM holding image data are also coupled. The coprocessor extracts an input pixel stream corresponding to input images from selected bus transactions, performs computations on the input stream to produce output pixel streams corresponding to output images, and inserts the output pixel streams into selected CPU-to-memory bus transactions so that the memory stores the data. The CPU generates the selected bus transactions with specially marked address and/or control signals. The coprocessor includes a lookup table, and a first row delay. The row delay accumulates the three most recent rows of input pixels, which are sent to Sobel and rank processing sections for neighborhood processing. The results are thresholded and formatted, and are either output directly or passed through an additional pair of row delays to accumulate three rows of result data for neighborhood peak detection.

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Cambridge, MA, United States of America

Steven Mark Rosenthal