The intelligent camera needs hard disk drive

278 11 Market and Future Needs of Industrial Imaging

The main advantages of CMOS sensors are lower production costs, lower power consumption, and higher dynamic range. For some appli-cations it might be useful to access pixel array randomly. The frame rate is no longer limited to more or less TV-standard. One of the most interesting features is the possibility of integrating the complete con-trol logic on the sensor die. Even A/D converters or some on-line filter functionality could be implemented. Complete subsystems could be available in the near future on a single sensor chip.

The computational power will grow by a factor of about 2 every year. Microprocessors with 64-bit architecture will become the next genera-tion standard. Costs for RAM-devices and mass storage will further decline. As a result, system costs will decrease while system power and functionality will increase.

Of course, some time lag will occur between trend-setting for stan-dard PC systems and its penetration as industrialized components. As there was a parallelism between them in the past so it will be in the future.

The costs of such a solution are significantly below a PC-based vision system, especially if all the invisible costs are taken into account.

Such an intelligent camera with preconfigured dedicated function-ality could be easily handled by customers without specific image pro-cessing knowledge. Acceptance regarding imaging technology will in-crease and products and services of industrial imaging will become more and more in demand.