Relf C.G. Image Acquisition and Processing with LabVIEW

CRC Press, 2004, -268 p.The introduction of LabVIEW over 16 years ago triggered the Virtual Instrumentation revolution that is still growing rapidly today. The tremendous advances in personal computers and consumer electronics continue to fuel this growth. For the same cost, today.s computers are about 100 times better than the machines of the LabVIEW 1 days, in CPU clock rate, RAM size, bus speed and disk size. This trend will likely continue for another 5 to 10 years.
Virtual Instrumentation Þrst brought the connection of electronic instruments to computers, then later added the ability to plug measurement devices directly into the computer. Then, almost 7 years ago, National Instruments expanded the vision of virtual instrumentation when it introduced its first image acquisition hardware along with the LabVIEW Image Analysis library. At the time, image processing on a personal computer was still a novelty requiring the most powerful machines and a lot of specialized knowledge on the part of the system developer. Since then, computer performance and memory size have continued to increase to the point where image processing is now practical on most modern PCs. In addition, the range of product offerings has expanded and higher-level software, such as Vision Builder, has become available to make development of image processing applications much easier.
Today, image processing is fast becoming a mainstream component of Virtual Instrumentation. Very few engineers, however, have had experience with image processing or the lighting techniques required to capture images that can be processed quickly and accurately. Hence the need for a book like this one. Christopher Relf has written a very readable and enjoyable introduction to image processing, with clear and straightforward examples to illustrate the concepts, good references to more detailed information, and many real-world solutions to show the breadth of vision applications that are possible. The lucid (pun intended) description of the role of, and options for, lighting is itself worth the price of the book.Image Types and File Management
Setting Up
Image Acquisition
Displaying Images
Image Processing
Morphology
Image Analysis
Machine Vision