Process automation through machine vision applications has dramatically improved cost effectiveness and hence the competitive edge of many manufacturing industries. Ironically, undergraduate machine vision education in most universities still stresses more on theory and piecewise algorithms with insufficient emphasis on the integration of these components to industrial automation. Florida Atlantic University proposes to develop an undergraduate laboratory that supports a number of machine vision experiments. The laboratory will have six workstations, each of which consists of a PC with a frame grabber, a CCD camera, and a lighting setup. The workstation will be a stand-alone system since all experiments can be run on it. The six workstations will also be linked by a local area network so that lab resources can be shared for remote users. This will be very convenient for commuter students who work full-time or part-time. A total of seven experiments and a project will be developed mainly for a 3-credit senior-level machine vision course. Many of the proposed lab experiments will be design-oriented and hence open-ended. After learning the basics, the students will devise their own schemes to accomplish their tasks using the available lab equipment and software packages. The course will emphasize an integrated system approach rather than specific algorithm implementation. By doing so, we hope that it will greatly enhance the students' ability to solve real-world engineering problems. Once the laboratory is established, we will reinforce the process by (a) seeking the participation of other faculty in lab development, (b) introducing evening/weekend classes for industrial participants and summer programs for high school students, and (c) setting up an internet home page to provide course materials such as lab manuals, video demonstrations and software.
