Smart camera

Not to be confused with Smart digital camera, Dynamic vision sensor, or Traffic enforcement camera.
Early smart camera (ca. 1985, in red) with an 8MHz Z80 compared to a modern device featuring Texas Instruments' C64 @1GHz

A smart camera is a machine vision system which, in addition to image capture circuitry, is capable of extracting application-specific information from the captured images, along with generating event descriptions or making decisions that are used in an intelligent and automated system.[1][2] A smart camera is a self-contained, standalone vision system with built-in image sensor in the housing of an industrial video camera. It is also known as an intelligent camera, a (smart) vision sensor, an intelligent vision sensor, a smart optical sensor, an intelligent optical sensor, a smart visual sensor, or an intelligent visual sensor.

The vision system and the image sensor can be integrated into one single piece of hardware known as intelligent image sensor or smart image sensor. It contains all necessary communication interfaces, e.g. Ethernet, as well as industry-proof 24V I/O lines for connection to a PLC, actuators, relays or pneumatic valves, and can be either static or mobile.[3] It is not necessarily larger than an industrial or surveillance camera. A capability in machine vision generally means a degree of development such that these capabilities are ready for use on individual applications. This architecture has the advantage of a more compact volume compared to PC-based vision systems and often achieves lower cost, at the expense of a somewhat simpler (or omitted) user interface. Smart cameras are also referred to by the more general term smart sensors.[4]

  1. ^ Ahmed Nabil Belbachir, ed. (2009). Smart Cameras. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4419-0952-7.
  2. ^ Alexander Hornberg (2006). Handbook of Machine Vision. Wiley-VCH. ISBN 3-527-40584-4.
  3. ^ Rinner, Bernhard; Wolf, Wayne (2018-10-17). "An Introduction to Distributed Smart Cameras". Proceedings of the IEEE. 96 (10): 1565–1575. doi:10.1109/JPROC.2008.928742. S2CID 22637359. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
  4. ^ Birem, Merwan; Berry, François (2014). "DreamCam: A modular FPGA-based smart camera architecture". Journal of Systems Architecture. 60 (6): 519–527. doi:10.1016/j.sysarc.2014.01.006. ISSN 1383-7621. S2CID 2095590. Retrieved 15 May 2021.