Manual-align system for packaging planar opticalwaveguide based on machine vision

The manual-align system for packaging planar optical waveguide was improved with 3 monochrome cameras added, as well as 3 AV to USB capture cards, through which the align images could be gathered. In order to achieve the parallelism detection of the waveguide splitter with the input and the output of optical fiber array, by using the LabVIEW8.2 and IMAQ vision software programming, a series of processing and identification including image brightnesscontrast-gamma(BCG) adjustments, reverse, closing, edge detection, manual thresholding, morphological changes and linear fitting were carried out. It was proved that this system could save 10 min of the packaging time on average taking the 132-channel planar optical waveguide by one journeyman for example, reduce the amount of labor of the operator and the alignment loss, as well as the human error.