Fraunhofer Institut for information and data processing in Karlsruhe (IITB) is one of 55 institutes of the Fraunhofer Society - the largest sponsor organization for applied research in Germany with approx. 1 billion € conversion per year. From that approximately 170 coworkers of the IITB more than 30 scientistswork in the area of image processing . The ITB has started more than 30 years ago with this sphere of activity. The main application fields are at present the interactive evaluation of aerial photographs (clearing-up), the automatic interpretation of natural scenes and the automatic visual check for applications in the industry. The latter sphere of activityis of the business field „visually inspecting systems “.

 The business field of visually inspecting systems develops and supplies imagery interpretation systems for particularly fastidious tasks for industrial visual checking. As picture-giving sensors excluding line cameras, usually highly soluble color-capable line cameras with data rates up to 60 MByte/s. For the real time evaluation of these data rates the IITB developed its own system platform on basis of industrial PCs under Microsoft Windows NT. The most important characteristics of the platform are two special processing boards for the collection and preprocessing of the pictures and real timable program system for the I/O and the image analysis.

 Three ranges of application were developed on basis of this platform system: for the automatic inspection of blister packs in the pharmaceutical industry, the automatic inspection of surfaces and the automatic assortment of bulk materials. Since 1998 the IITB supplied altogether approximately 180 image interpretation systems. They are world-wide in the employment. The supply took place thereby partially directly from the IITB to the user; to the predominant part however over system integrators like the company IES OptoSort.