In order to measure the color of 25 boxes, a vision camera rather than 25 separate color sensors is required. Especially if the customer also has 46 boxes on which the simulated playfields are mounted and the task is to keep the maintenance costs as low as possible, which in practice means efficient and minimal hardware parts with a long lifespan.

Vision Partners proposed a solution to this by means of 46 industrial Ethernet color cameras in which each camera reads 1 playing field of 25 squares by color and transmits it to the PC. A division was made in which respectively two times 11 and two times 12 Ethernet cameras per PC were connected. So a total of 4 industrial PCs for real-time measurement, transmission and processing of 46×25 is 1,150 color squares!!!!

Here the playfields were placed in a public area where we did not want any influence from the environment to ensure correct color measurement. On this, the cameras were built into the bottom of the playboxes including 2 LED light sources so that the camera can stably determine the color of the imposed playfield in a closed space via the bottom.

Due to the fact that the color of the playing fields were not always consistent and that the cameras can also differ slightly from each other due to the sensor, calibration or LED light, we had a challenge in selecting the color model to be used. Since most vision Algorithms have multiple parameters for color measurement this became very complex for unambiguous adjustment of all boxes with their tolerances per color. We then opted for the so-called HSV model which indicates the color on a scale of 0-360 degrees, with the other two parameters indicating the brightness and lightness of the color. The advantage here is that by means of only 1 parameter, (H)ue = color, all boxes can now easily be set when it meets 1 of the 5 possible colors.