Progressive-Scan Gives You the Big Picture, Quickly

Jerry Berger, Sony Corp.

Global manufacturing competition and the ever-increasing requirements for improved product quality have placed greater demands on vision systems to acquire and process more visual information in shorter time periods. These demands have prompted the migration from traditional interlaced-scan video camera technology to progressive-scan.

Industrial inspection, traffic monitoring, intelligent transportation systems, high-speed wire bonding, optical character recognition and mall kiosks are among the applications that benefit from progressive scan's full-frame image capture capabilities.

Before trying to determine how progressive scan has affected applications for vision technologies, it is critical to understand how it differs from interlaced-scan technology, and further, to educate the end users about how it helps solve their problems. Briefly, unlike interlaced-scan imagers, full-frame imagers grab a whole frame rather than just "stripes," so they provide clear images of moving objects, such as vehicles, assembly line parts and printed materials.