A machine vision inspection system consists of a camera, optics, illumination, and image acquisition system. The illumination system among these uses LED lighting source. Therefore, the driving method of LED lighting source is very important. The two main driving methods of LED lighting system for machine vision are Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) control driving and strobe control driving. PWM control driving method has problems such as a temperature rising of LED and a flickering in image measurement for inspection. On the other hand, strobe control driving method has a difficulty in the control of light intensity because of too short on-time. In this study, we propose a new hybrid-dimming control driving method for LED lighting source for machine vision. The proposed new hybrid-dimming control driving method can control current intensity and current on-time simultaneously so that it can extract clearer images with a high precision without the light saturation of image.
In this paper, LED lighting system is realized by using Bluetooth wireless communications and smartphones. A blue tooth module with a lighting control function is manufactured by miniaturizing a development board of TI company and the volume of LED dimming system as a whole is reduced. And atrial product is materialized by designing a hardware composed of the manufactured blue tooth module, LED down light equipped with degree warm white and cool white, and 2-channel LED driver; and LED dimming software. The materialized trial product is controled in terms of the brightness and color temperature of LED light source using an application of a smartphone. The experiment showed that the users can easily control the intensity of illumination of LED light source by using the scroll bar of the applications of smartphones. In addition, the color temperatures of both warm white and cool white can be controlled, and when the color temperature of the trial product using the manufactured Bluetooth module is compared with that of a trial product of TI company, they show the same color temperatures.