Industrial Vision Sandbox — Jamie McTaggart

SURFACE ANOMALY DETECTED

Drag the light sphere — right-click / two-finger to orbit

DARK-FIELD OPTIMAL

Low-angle grazing light casts shadows into surface micro-geometry. Defects, scratches, and raised features become visible.

DIFFUSE

Mid-elevation diffuse illumination. Colour and contrast are readable but surface texture detail is reduced.

BRIGHT-FIELD

Overhead bright-field configuration. Specular hotspots begin forming; defects are washed out by direct reflection.

SPECULAR GLARE

Camera is looking directly into the specular reflection cone. Saturation masks all surface detail — the machine vision system is effectively blind.

Pharmaceutical blister packs use aluminium foil laminates with metalness >0.9 and roughness <0.15 — making illumination geometry the single largest variable in a vision system's ability to detect defects.

The foil surface contains a deliberate 0.022mm groove defect (the kind caused by a sealing die misalignment). Drag the light to find the angle where it becomes detectable — or disappears entirely.

Solving this geometry problem in production — for every product format, every line speed — is what Cognex and Basler systems are configured to do.