Embedded Line Scan Image Sensors: The Low Cost Alternative for High Speed Imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, high-speed line scan imaging system using off-the-shelf components, achieving comparable quality to expensive commercial systems at a fraction of the cost.

Contribution

It introduces a step-by-step design method and simulation approach for building affordable high-speed line scan cameras with validated experimental results.

Findings

Simulations accurately predict image quality.

Low-cost setup achieves comparable quality to high-end systems.

Cost is reduced by approximately 20 times.

Abstract

In this paper we propose a low-cost high-speed imaging line scan system. We replace an expensive industrial line scan camera and illumination with a custom-built set-up of cheap off-the-shelf components, yielding a measurement system with comparative quality while costing about 20 times less. We use a low-cost linear (1D) image sensor, cheap optics including a LED-based or LASER-based lighting and an embedded platform to process the images. A step-by-step method to design such a custom high speed imaging system and select proper components is proposed. Simulations allowing to predict the final image quality to be obtained by the set-up has been developed. Finally, we applied our method in a lab, closely representing the real-life cases. Our results shows that our simulations are very accurate and that our low-cost line scan set-up acquired image quality compared to the high-end commercial vision system, for a fraction of the price.