The book offers a thorough introduction to machine vision. It is organized in two parts. The first part covers the image acquisition, which is the crucial component of most automated visual inspection systems. All important methods are described in great detail and are presented with a reasoned structure. The second part deals with the modeling and processing of image signals and pays particular regard to methods, which are relevant for automated visual inspection.

Diffractive lens arrays are proposed in this work for application in reflected-light confocal microscopes. They have overcome the limitations between fields of view and resolution of traditional objectives. Experiments of multi-spot confocal imaging in surface metrology and fluorescence microscopy have been demonstrated based on the proposed concepts, which have shown capabilities of high-resolution measurement over a large area.

An adaptive microscope with axial chromatic encoding is designed and developed, namely the AdaScope. With the ability to confocally address any locations within the measurement volume, the AdaScope provides the hardware foundation for a cascade measurement strategy to be developed, dramatically accelerating the speed of 3D confocal microscopy.