DALSA's Sapera Essential Color Tool Ideal for Many Inspection Applications; Free Run-Times Offered for Select Tools

WATERLOO, ON -- (Marketwire) -- 03/03/09 -- DALSA Corporation (TSX: DSA), a global leader in machine vision technology, today announced it has advanced the color capability of its Sapera Essential software for machine vision applications. Sapera Essential (Edition 01/2009) is a cost-effective machine vision software toolkit that bundles board-level acquisition and control with advanced image processing capability. It is intended to deliver the critical functionality needed to design, develop and deploy high-performance machine vision applications, while at the same time significantly lowering deployment costs. This version of Sapera Essential provides support for Windows 64-bit and the .Net interface.

With the introduction of the Sapera Essential Color Tool, the software delivers improved color capability which can be divided into four main categories:

--  Color Conversions: a series of optimized color space conversion
    functions supporting RGB, YUV, HSV and LAB formats. Split and merge
    functions are also available for plane-by-plane processing.
--  Color Image Processing: a set of basic image processing operators such
    as thresholding, histogram, projections, statistics, clustering, and color
    reduction.
--  Color Calibration: a color correction algorithm trained from a
    standardized color chart and used to compensate for different lighting
    conditions.
--  Color Classification: a color classifier trained from a series of
    color samples and used to separate color regions of an image. Coupled with
    a blob analyzer it is used to inspect color images in areas like food
    inspection and pharmaceutical.
    

Hardware independent, Sapera Essential offers users a single API and a comprehensive feature set, including: acquisition control, image processing primitive, Blob analysis, area and shaped based pattern matching, color, barcode (linear/1D and matrix/2D codes), OCR and lens correction tools with easy-to-use application development and evolution tools.

Fully compliant with DALSA's Trigger-to-Image Reliability framework, the latest version of Sapera Essential now also includes support for the Windows 64-bit and .NET platforms. Now, developers creating new code or porting legacy code to 64-bit operation have access to a complete software development kit (SDK) from DALSA. The Color Tool also provides both a C++ and .NET interface and is supported under Sapera Architect, a GUI-based image processing prototyping environment.