The Operator Console is meant to provide a basic, yet customizable, interface to Imatest IT that provides some of the functionality needed for a production environment. This interface allows the user to perform Blemish or SFRplus tests while capturing from any of the devices supported by the Imatest 3.10 library. Optionally, the developer can allow for acquisition from a device with a DirectShow driver or from a file. The results of a Blemish or SFRplus test are displayed within the Operator Console dialog with the overall pass/fail status prominently displayed. Additionally, for SFRplus, the pass/fail status of individual regions (the center and four quadrants away from the center) is overlaid on the image displayed to the user. For more information, please see the Program usage section.

Other features include

A password-protected GUI for modifying the pass/fail criteria
A GUI for quickly changing the device from which to acquire
A secondary window to display the full JSON output
Image acquisition and image tests (e.g. SFRplus,Blemish) are run in their own thread with data transfer only through buffers controlled by critical sections

System architecture, or our cast of characters

Since every possible user need cannot be anticipated a priori, the Operator Console is designed to be readily customized by developers. The Operator Console is based around two main classes, COperatorConsoleApp and COperatorConsoleDlg, which control the application and main window, respectively. The COperatorConsoleApp object holds all relevant data and communicates with the various helper threads discussed below, while the COperatorConsoleDlg object only supplies the user interface without holding test-related data.

To make the user interface as customizable as possible, the COperatorConsoleApp and COperatorConsoleDlg communicate through a message-passing interface wherein events in the user interface are transmitted by COperatorConsoleDlg as a simple message that COperatorConsoleApp intercepts and performs the appropriate action. As a consequence of this degree of separation between COperatorConsoleApp and COperatorConsoleDlg, the developer can completely change the interface without having to modify the code underlying the application.

Several classes are associated with COperatorConsoleApp. Below is an abbreviated list of the more critical classes with brief descriptions.

External thread objects

The ThreadControl class is used to control threads that run various operations for COperatorConsoleApp, including one thread to acquire images from a camera, another to perform a Blemish test and parse the JSON results to determine the pass/fail status of the required metrics, and a third thread to perform a SFRplus test and determine pass/fail status.
The ModelessDialogThread class is used for controlling and creating a modeless dialog window (e.g. the one accessed from the 'Show JSON' button) that runs without halting the main application
StdoutThread and StderrThread classes, which are both derived from the base class StdoutRedirect, operate in separate threads to redirect stdout(and cout) and stderr(and cerr) to a field in the main window.

Image-testing classes

BlemishTest and SFRplusTest (which both are derived from the base class ImageTest) contain the necessary data and functions to perform Blemish and SFRplus tests, respectively, on an image and parse the results to determine pass/fail for various criteria. Note that the pointer to the function responsible for the test and results parse (ImageTest::ThreadProc) is passed to the corresponding ThreadControl object as part of the initialization of the ThreadControl (e.g. blemish.ThreadProc is passed to m_blemishControl in COperatorConsoleApp::InitBlemishThread()).

Data structures/classes

TestResults is a struct that COperatorConsoleApp places all results of a test
AppFlags is used by COperatorConsoleApp to contain the boolean flags resulting from various operations
setup_settings contains the all the setup details for the camera (e.g. width and height in pixels) as well the lists of strings needed to fill the various combo-boxes and lists in the CSetup dialog window class.
Config contains various configuration details for the program
CPassFailSettings contains all of the data needed to create the pass/fail settings window

External dialogs

CSetup is the class underlying the setup dialog
CPassFail is the class underlying the pass/fail dialog
ModelessDialogThread is the class used for the 'Show JSON' dialog
CPasswordDialog is the class underlying the password dialog for the pass/fail dialog

Acquisition classes

ImageAcquisition is the base class from which FileAcquisition, ImatestLibAcq, SimpleDirectShowAcq, and FileAcq
FileAcquisition and FileAcq are used for 'acquiring' from a file
ImatestLibAcq is used for acquisition from a camera using acquire_image() from the Imatest library
SimpleDirectShowAcq is used for acquisition from a DirectShow camera