User:MachineVisionConsultant/Vision Processor

A Vision Processor is a hardware device that manipulates images captured by a camera in a machine vision or robotics application. Vision processors may be a circuit board inserted in a computer or may be a standalone module. Software for image processing may be integrated into the device, or may be loaded externally from a controlling computer system.

Vision processors are often required in implementing industrial machine vision applications because general-purpose computer operating systems are often unable to process images in real time with a guarantee that a given frame of a video stream can be processed before the next frame arrives. In other words, a vision processor delivers real-time capabilities to the front end of the vision application.

General Architecture
Components include:
 * A frame grabber that interfaces with the camera and stores the image in a dedicated memory buffer prior to processing.

System-on-Chip
Some vision processor hardware is implemented in a system on a chip (SOC) design using a custom integrated circuit built up of cores and other logic.