Quality Control of Critical Computer Vision Cameras
SphereOptics has entered into a partnership with Imatest to expand its offering to customers. Driverless transport systems and autonomous systems in medicine, aerospace, and driver assistance systems, depend on highly complex sensors in order to be able to navigate safely. This sensor technology uses lidar, radar and cameras, among others. To optimize the camera systems, the company has now brought Imatest to its side.
Founded in 2004 by photographer and engineer Norman Koren in Boulder, Colorado, USA the company develops software and test equipment for testing the image quality of digital cameras. It is now one of the world’s leading manufacturers of software, equipment and test boards in this field.
Cameras, especially when used in areas such as vehicles, medicine, aerospace, must have a reliably high quality, because they provide driver assistance systems with optical information to reliably detect people or obstacles or provide the basis for diagnoses in medicine.
The task of computer vision involves analyzing a stream of images from an imaging device. Some simple applications such as object counting may be less dependent on good camera quality. But for more advanced computer vision applications where there is limited control of lighting & distance, the quality of your overall vision system will depend on the quality of the camera system. This is increasingly important when an error made by the vision system could lead to a decision that impacts safety. Along with proper optimization of a computer vision model, ensuring that that model is fed by imagery from a high-quality camera system is critical to maximizing system performance.
To ensure that cameras meet these high image quality requirements, the Imatest software, together with the test equipment, analyzes a variety of quality factors such as image sharpness, color reproduction, image noise, dynamic range, tonal reproduction, scattered light, lens distortion, vignetting and texture reproduction.
Imatest has decades of experience in these areas and in addition, the company has played a significant role in the creation of new improved standards through active cooperation with the ISO standardization bodies. Imatest is a member of the International Organization for Standardization and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and thus contributes to the introduction of standardized methods for the analysis of image quality.
For more information: www.sphereoptics.de
