Patent · US Expired

Method and system for automatically calibrating a color camera in a machine vision system

US5821993A · kind A · utility

57Cited by
15References
12Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventor

Key dates

Filing dateJan 25, 1996
Grant dateOct 13, 1998
Priority date
Expiry dateJan 25, 2016

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC H)Electricity
  • CPC primaryH04N17/002
  • WIPO fieldAudio-visual technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A pair of calibration algorithms are provided for calibrating a color camera in a machine vision system. The first and most general form of the calibration algorithm requires that a calibration target be shown to a well adjusted machine vision system. The calibration target contains samples of red, green and blue. A gray level histogram is taken of each of the resulting red, green and blue images and is used to generate corresponding standard cumulative probability functions. The standard cumulative probability functions, together with a copy of the calibration target, is provided to a machine vision system having its own color camera which requires calibration. The same above-noted steps are repeated for this system and the resulting cumulative probability functions are compared to the corresponding standard cumulative probability functions to obtain gains for the red, green and blue channels of the camera to be calibrated . In the second simplified version of the calibration algorithm, a target patch of pure white is provided and camera outputs for red, green and blue are determined while observing the patch. The average gain for each of the output channels of the color camera is…

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.