Smart Vision Lights, a designer and manufacturer of high-brightness LED lights for industrial applications, received Vision Systems Design magazine’s silver award for product innovation in the category of lighting, lenses, and optics for its LED Light Manager (LLM) product. Part of the magazine’s Innovators Awards program, the honor was bestowed at The Vision Show in Boston. The judging panel consisted of esteemed experts from system-integrator and end-user companies.
The LLM addresses the lighting control needs of multi-light machine vision systems by driving up to four separate lights of virtually any type or up to four individual quadrants or channels within an integrated photometric or multispectral ring light solution. Each program can contain up to four sequences with up to four lights set to continuous on, off, any intensity level in between, or even OverDriveTM strobe mode.
“Our LLM LED Light Manager simplifies 3D and other complex multi-light applications by encapsulating the manager in the industry’s most user-friendly design,” says Matt Pinter, head of engineering at Smart Vision Lights. “An intuitive browser-based interface allows technicians of any skill level to program the four quadrants of a single LED illumination system.”
By capturing successive images of a stationary object as it is illuminated by a sequence of lights, photometric image-processing software can determine the 3D position and orientation of every pixel on the object’s surface. The same technique can generate 2D images of multiple regions of interest using separate lights and/or cameras as part of large, complex machine vision solutions, such as vision-guided robot work cells. To simplify the design of photometric 3D systems, SVL has created a number of LLM Photometric Light Kits, which include lights with universal internal drivers, oblique-angle brackets for directing light, and the requisite cables.
LLM is also appropriate for multispectral imaging solutions where the LED illumination source acts as the spectral band-selection mechanism, instead of using broadband white halogen lamps with filters placed before the camera. Using the color of illuminating light as the spectral band selection mechanism can greatly reduce the cost of multispectral imaging solutions while increasing the amount of light available for imaging applications.
The silver award for the LLM is Smart Vision Lights’ latest Innovators Awards honor. In 2017, SVL received a gold award for its LM Series of mini LEDs. Its Line High Power Series of LED lights for line-scan imaging received a platinum award in 2016.
