Dalsa announced the release of its enhanced Sapera Vision Software, by adding two new platforms in addition to its Sapera Essential vision development tool kit. By leveraging today's accelerated computer processing technology, the new Sapera Nitrous platform turbo charges Sapera Essential's functionality with GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) and multi-core processing for faster execution. The new Sapera Architect Plus platform is an additional layer that incorporates the speed of Nitrous, plus allows machine vision OEMs to prototype, model and streamline their algorithms without having to develop code.

"Dalsa's Sapera Vision Software has a proven track record in providing our OEMs and Systems Integrators with the tools they need to develop application-specific software programs for industrial inspection," states Inder Kohli, product line manager for Dalsa. "With the new Sapera Nitrous and Architect Plus platforms, developers will be able to take advantage of faster processing speeds and rapidly model and deploy different application scenarios, resulting in faster time-to-market for their machine vision solutions."

The Core Vision Development Tool Kit
Sapera Essential is Dalsa's core vision development tool kit and bundles image acquisition and control with image processing tools to provide OEMs and system integrators with the critical functionality needed to design, develop, and deploy high-performance machine vision systems. Sapera Essential now includes a gauging tool called the Measurement tool to facilitate real-world dimensional measurements. The Sapera Measurement tool offers a wide range of pre-configured markers permitting multiple concurrent measurements along different shapes with sub-pixel accuracy.

In addition, Sapera Essential's image processing tools include a Search package that supports both area and edge-based pattern finding techniques, a versatile Barcode tool for both 1-D and 2-D decoding and grading, color tool, blob analysis capability for defect detection and calibration tool for lens correction.

Sapera Essential provides quick access to software functions to control image acquisition, manage image memory, and facilitate image processing and analysis tasks. The two new Dalsa software offerings, Sapera Nitrous and Sapera Architect Plus, leverage the entire suite of Sapera Essential functionality.

Turbo Charges Vision Processing
Sapera Nitrous permits Sapera Essential functions to leverage acceleration offered by the GPU and multi-core CPUs (Central Processing Units) in a seamless fashion. The current GPU implementation of Nitrous is based on NVIDIA's CUDA and the multi-core optimization support x86 based CPUs. As a result of faster execution speed, image processing for filters, morphology, point-to-point, color and other image processing functions are optimized.

Vision Application Quick Prototyping and Performance Tuning
Sapera Architect Plus gives system integrators and industrial vision automation specialists a user-friendly, non-programming graphical environment to quickly prototype and test drive application specific imaging tools. An intuitive interface allows users to gain insight into inter-relationship between various parameters by adjusting them in real-time. Sapera Architect Plus draws on the powerful functionality of Sapera Essential and Nitrous and combines it with a point-and-click interface to capture program flow-control to simplify vision algorithm development.