This research is intended to design and develop a high speed vision system for precision inspection. It will consist of three hierarchial levels. The first level will consist of an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for performing the pattern matching operation. The second level of hierarchy will consist of interface structures for efficient and concurrent data processing and interface communications. The third level of the system will be designed and implemented to perform the extension computation of pattern processing which is done on a pixel by pixel basis. For this critical leve a special parallel processing architecture will be researched. A proof of concept prototype will be fabricated to verify the system. High speed precision vision inspection has a very wide variety of uses in the manufacturing industry. They range from inspection of labels in the food packaging industry to size information on diesel injectors. The successful development of this system should impact the productivity of a range of manufacturing enterprises.
