en.Wedoany.com Reported - China's ECOLOR Optoelectronics has released a color 2.5D imaging system, which integrates true-color imaging with 2.5D computational imaging to simultaneously reconstruct the surface color and morphology information of objects.
Traditional 2.5D vision imaging mostly adopts monochrome solutions, which can only capture surface morphology but fail to restore color information. The industry has long faced the dilemma of balancing morphology and color.
In precision manufacturing inspection, product surfaces often exhibit both structural weak defects (such as subtle bumps, dents, and scratches) and color defects (such as color differences and oxidation discoloration). Traditional 2D vision struggles to identify subtle height features, while the commonly used 2.5D imaging technology in the industry, based on monochrome cameras, highlights microscopic morphology but loses true color. To detect both types of defects, companies typically need to set up two independent workstations, increasing hardware costs and production line space, and image matching issues may reduce inspection throughput.
To address these issues, ECOLOR Optoelectronics has launched a color 2.5D imaging system based on its full-stack R&D capabilities in "optics, mechanics, electronics, computing, and software." In terms of hardware architecture, the system is fully compatible with RGB color line scan and area scan cameras, supporting a variety of 2.5D white light sources, including dome lights, line lights, and ring lights. To address the edge false color issue caused by high-speed motion of workpieces and differences in response across spectral bands during time-division exposure of color line scan cameras with multi-angle light sources, ECOLOR has developed a false color removal algorithm. By optimizing dispersion correction coefficients, it eliminates dispersion in the color average image, maintaining color fidelity and image purity under high-speed scanning.
The imaging system supports two technical routes: color photometric stereo and color phase deflection. The color photometric stereo system is suitable for diffuse or weakly reflective surfaces, while the color phase deflection system is used for highly reflective metal materials, achieving full-scenario coverage for inspection of different materials and complex processes.
In application cases, for PCB appearance inspection, traditional 2D AOI solutions struggle to identify defects with minimal height differences, and monochrome 2.5D solutions cannot distinguish ink color differences. Using ECOLOR's color line scan photometric stereo system, a single scan can simultaneously output a 2.5D feature algorithm map and an RGB color average map. The former extracts morphological defects such as scratches and pits, while the latter determines ink color differences and silk-screen defects, achieving integrated stereoscopic defect detection and color verification. In the inspection of laptop metal middle frames, to address issues of strong metal reflection and interference from machining tool marks, ECOLOR's color line scan phase deflection imaging system uses a self-developed 2.5D tool mark removal algorithm to filter out tool mark interference, combined with a defect enhancement algorithm to highlight defects, while color imaging captures surface oxidation discoloration and dark spots.
