Patent ID: 7180606

Claim:
A machine vision system comprising: a line light source for generating illumination which is reflected from a substrate having items as an undulating line having a pattern corresponding to a pattern of said items on the substrate, in which bottom parts of the line correspond to the substrate and top parts correspond to top portions of said items on the substrate; a camera mounted to capture images of said reflected undulating line to provide image lines, wherein the camera has a full array of pixels, and processes only pixels of one or more particular regions of interest in said full array or pixels; an image processor for processing one of said image lines to: determine scene height according to pattern of said image line, and dynamically determine extent of warp in the substrate also according to said image line by dynamically monitoring position of the image line with respect to the region of interest for translational offset of the image line and for skewing of the image line, and generating a motion control signal according to said monitoring; and a motion controller for dynamically adjusting camera-substrate separation so that the position of the image line remains at or close to a fixed nominal position within the region of interest.