Counting of Integrated Circuits by photo or video

[Devildog]

TL;DR Summary

Counting of Integrated Circuits by photo or video

I am looking for a quick, cheap yet reliable way to count IC's that are in anti-statis shipping tubes. I am thinking of a way to count automatically via a photo or video?

 

[berkeman]

Welcome to PF.

Can you post a few representative photos? Use the "Attach files" link below the Edit window to upload the images.

Have you considered using weighing instead of photo/video?

 

[sophiecentaur]

There's a counting app in apple store. You can probably try before you buy.

It's almost a trivial task for new AI, I reckon.

 

[jrmichler]

Search machine vision. This should be a near trivial task for a modern machine vision system. There are a number of good machine vision manufacturers that can supply a good and reliable system. Just do not expect it to be cheap.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Are they all the same. If so, can you weigh them?

 

[Devildog]

Welcome to PF.

Can you post a few representative photos? Use the "Attach files" link below the Edit window to upload the images.

Have you considered using weighing instead of photo/video?

currently looking at using a laser sensor to count the pins on the IC

 

[TheJerC]

As someone suggested, you should look into machine vision. You should be able to achieve exactly what you're looking for via "cameras" / sensors. Some brands to take a look at - Cognex, Keyence, Omron.

 

[Joshy]

I wouldn't suggest this as an accurate way unless you really put a lot into your own code, but I wanted to share maybe a crude fast way if you know roughly which shapes you are looking for you can use mathematical morphology on a tool like matlab or (free) imagej. On MATLAB i'll use something like strel() and imerode() followed by bwlabel() https://www.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/bwlabel.html

When I look at packages usually ICs are much bigger than passives like bypass caps so I would make a rectangle or diamond that's slightly bigger than the passives and you might be able to get away with that.