Architector Vision Suite
Architector Vision Suite is an image acquisition and manipulation program designed by Quest Innovations with a focus on multi-spectral and multi-channel images. It supports images with any number of channels and allows you to visualize all channels at the same time. Quest-Innovations develops and manufactures high quality smart CCD / CMOS multi-spectral cameras and dedicated software for advanced imaging applications. The main markets that Quest focuses on are: defence & security, science & life science, medical, agriculture and industry. Quest-Innovations is able to deliver standard and/or customized solutions for almost any application where (multi-spectral) camera vision technology is an integrated part of a process, product or service.
Besides the Vision Suite, the Architector Core SDK is also available for writing your own applications.
General
Architector Vision Suite is part of the camera package for use in development of machine vision applications using Quest Innovations camera systems. It is a comprehensive collection of the software components based on the common Architector Vision Suite SDK for the development of the machine vision programs. Architector Vision Suite is aimed at demanding applications in industrial image processing. It is compatible for use in a wide variety of machine vision applications using Quest Innovations multi spectral camera systems.
Visualisations
Architector Vision Suite can run one or more applications at the same time to perform tasks such as viewing images from a camera or file, save live image streams to disk or convert image files to other formats. Besides this, numerous features are available to show your image data:
- Intensity profiles to give an overview of the horizontal and vertical intensity values of the pixels at the crosshair position.
- Histogram for the overview of all pixels in the image, summed per value.
- 3D views for multiple 3D representations of the selected 2D image. With mouse movements it’s possible to rotate and drag the 3D view around. Double-clicking an 3D image view will rotate it back to the initial position.
- Pixel data view shows a more detailed view of the selected pixel values. Depending on the selected mode (RGB color | Multi channel | One channel) the window shows the values of one or more channels of a pixel.
Apps and plug-in support
Apps are small programs inside Architector Vision Suite. One app, for example, provides a live-capture for cameras with some real-time image processing and visualization options. Another app is tailored for recording images from a camera. But much more complex apps can also be created: for example apps that measure 3D shapes or color, or maybe even both. Because Architector Vision Suite can load apps, and apps can be added with a smart plug-in mechanism, there is no limit to what Architector Vision Suite can do. As long as there is an app for it, you can do it with Architector Vision Suite.
Additionally, Architector Vision Suite provides all the basic functionality for apps such as connecting to cameras, loading images from file and much more. Apps get all this for free! Developers benefit from this because coding an app is much faster than implementing a complete application from scratch. And users benefit because they can add new functionality to Architector Vision Suite at any time. For OEM users another interesting option is that apps can be rebranded, using your color scheme and logo instead the default one.
The same plug-in mechanism that allows you to add apps to Architector Vision Suite can also be employed to add support for additional cameras, frame grabbers or image operators to Architector Vision Suite. This lets you add support for a new type of frame grabber that you purchased along with a new camera, and use it with any app in Architector Vision Suite.
Plug-in support is provided to add new plug-ins that come available, or even add your own C++ plug-in. The basic version of Architector Vision Suite does not provide build in third party frame grabber support, but supported frame grabbers can be added using the plug-in functionality.
User manual
The software user manual is available at the Architector Vision Suite product page.
The Image viewer app displays images from live streams (from cameras) or image sequences from files. For multispectral images it is possible to control which channels are mapped to the RGB display channels.It is possible to control a camera with the Image viewer. Apart from that you can also load images or image sequences from files on the hard drive of your computer. Cameras can be started and stopped using camera control buttons. Saved image sequences can be played back from file, you can also jog through the sequence, or jump to the front or back by dragging the slider. It is possible to adjust the display settings with different lookup tables and other features.
For images that contain more than three channels, there is no standard method to map the image channels to a standard greyscale or RGB image. With the image viewer you can create a combined visualization that contains the information of at most four channels. For this an alpha blend function is applied to merge the fourth channel with a background image of red, green and blue channels. The pixel data of the overlay channel is used as alpha value while blending the overlay color with the background image. The two sliders for intensity and cross-over allow you to modify the alpha value to control how strong the overlay color appears in the final image.
Instruction videos:
The Image recorder app records images from live streams (cameras) to image files. For multispectral images it is possible to control which channels are mapped to the RGB display channels. The recorder supports several well known image file formats like bitmap, jpeg and others. You can control how many images are stored and where the resulting file is placed on your system.
Instruction videos:
The Image converter app loads images from disk and converts them to other image file formats, other pixel representations and channel mappings or even both! Just select the file that contains the image or image sequence that you want to convert and convert the selected the (sub-)sequence to any available type. All you have to do is specify the output file name.
Instruction videos:
The operator viewer app provides a basic layout for all available operators. Depending on the type of the software certain operators might not be available. The app windows can be divided in three sections; the thumbnail strip where thumbnails of all loaded images are available, the display area of the selected images and the available operators list. Before operators are executed images need to be added to app. An open dialog will appear to select the input images. After selecting the correct image(s) they will be available as a thumbnail in the strip. The display area shows the selected image(s), if more than one image is selected, the available space is divided over the number of images.
Each of the available operators has its own settings, you can view the setting of an operator by double-clicking on the name in the list and hovering over the key and value setting. If the operator uses two input images the two selected images are used in selection order as input for the operator.
Instruction videos:
