PC-Based Image Processing Systems for Laboratory Use

Several PC-based image processing systems developed for experimental measurements in our laboretory are described in this paper. They are a motion measurement system, motion picture analysis systems and color image processing systems for robotics. High quality with low cost image digitizing boards become available to use, and a capacity of RAM boards grows rapidly. So, PC-based automatic measuring equip ments with image processing function for individual purpose can be constructed easily. Characteristics and probrems to use commercial image digitizing boards for PC are pointed out. The important factors to use image processing system comfortably are data processing speed and available memory size. High speed color image processing program for PC (CIP-PC) was developed to save execute time and memory size. A CIP-PC contains many fundamental image processing programs coded by an assembler, and each subroutine programs is optimized. It becomes easy to make an automatic measuring system by a personal computer (PC) with image processing functions for experiments in a laboratory, because high quality with low cost image digitizing boards and RAM boards for a PC system are recently available to use. A visual motion measurement system composed by mini-computer is expensive and too large to move comfortable. So, this system is used in a special experiment, in spite of its superior ability. A PC system becomes very compact, and has many interactive functions such as a video display terminal, a console, a mouse system, and many peripheral equipmenta controlled from I/O ports. A progress of computing ability of PC is also remarkable. A standard clock frequency is 10MHz; and maximum main memory size packaged in a PC is more than 1MB by using of a random acces memory (RAM) board. The highest capacity of a commercial RAM board for PC i~ 32Mb. High capacity disks as external data storages are also available. Therefore, an image processing system for laboratory use can be easily constructed by a PC with image digitizing boards and RAM boards. Several PC-based image processing systems developed for experimental measurements in our laboratory are described in this paper. PC: A personal computer of PC9801 series made by NEC are used as a host controller of image processing systems. A PC9801 is the most widely used 16bits PC in Japan. Peripheral equipments and commercial softwares are also the most abundant. The proper operating system (0s) of this PC is N88DISKBASIC. A memory map of this PC is shown in Fig.1111. The OS of MS-DOS is also availble, but the N88DISKBASIC system was mainly used to save memory size, because the system was stored in ROM as shown in Fig.1. A primitive assembler called MONITOR which is included in the N88DISKBASIC was used to develop CIP-PC. The clock frequency used is 10MHz. A CPU of this PC is a V30 which is almost the same as the 8086[2,31. Types of used PCs are E, VM2, VM21 and VX21. A main difference of these types are memory size. It is available to use four slots of interface card. Various kinds of interface card were used as necessary to meet the experimental requirement. They were image digitizing boards, RAM boards, DIO boards, AID converter boards, and GPIB interface cards.