In March 2022, Scorpion Vision engineers installed some ‘Machine Vision Cells’ in the newly built engineering building, Z Block at the University of the West of England in Bristol.

Scorpion Vision is very pleased to be sponsoring the Lab with dedicated machine vision equipment designed to allow students to experiment with specialist industrial cameras and LED light sources.

Our contribution to the engineering department of UWE went alongside an un-built Cruden driving simulator, a flight simulator and the “Igloo Cave” which is a room with augmented reality and an extremely powerful computer to run it all.

Our equipment included 3 cells each which demonstrated a different facet of machine vision, which were the importance of lighting, polarisation and a technique known as photometric stereo. The Lighting cell included various different types of lighting supplied by MBJ Imaging, including back-lightingcoaxial, and dome lighting to name but a few. The polarisation cell included two wide bar lights, a backlight, all with polarising filters. Finally, the photometric stereo cell consisted of 4 wide bar lights which were blue, red, green and IR.

All the cells were equipped with HIK Robot Machine Vision Cameras and Lenses.

These cells will enable the users to learn how to solve problems encountered in many machine vision applications using these various tools, after all, machine vision is helpless without reliable images.

Photometric Stereo Cell

Although our modest contribution seems somewhat superfluous in comparison to the other equipment in the room, its utility in machine vision, particularly for industrial automation cannot be understated. These cells will provide unique learning experiences which will prove vital dealing with automated machine vision real world environments for both lecturers and students alike. This is because, real world machine vision applications do not utilise extremely high tech equipment like racing simulators. The purpose of machine vision systems is to allow machine visions to function efficiently, quickly and most importantly reliably, for example, a success rate of above 99.9%. This aspect of our equipment is well understood by both Lyndon Smith and Andy Hill who were both very appreciative of the cells and their utility for machine vision applications.