Brand New to TwinCAT3

So for my senior design project in electrical engineering my group and I are designing an inspection system using twinCAT3 as the basis of the brains. I personally up until this point have not done anything image processing wise or anything in TwinCAT3 up until this point. The mechanical engineers in my group have and decided it was best to base our project around the Hough circle transform for detection of a circular metal clamp. I am having difficulties implementing the Hough circle transform in TwinCAT3 (they have previously done it in Matlab and simulink)as well as importing images to test before the GiGe camera and PC come in from ordering. I currently have the images I would like to test in an image pool under GVL but using the command ImagePool.TestImage (ID for image is TestImage and the image pool is named ImagePool) throws the error that ImagePool needs to be instantiated to access and that the identifier TestImage is not defined which I assume is because it is declared in ImagePool which isn't being accessed and I am unsure why or how to access the FB ImagePool.


Please help as I am brand new to TwinCAT3 and image processing.

Is ImagePool FB a part of some image processing library?

I might be missing something here, but seems to me you need to declare an instance of ImagePool object and use it in the program. Can you add something like

ImagePool myImagePool;

in the FB variable declaration section and use myImagePool in the program?

So the entire goal which I might be approaching incorrectly in the first place is to upload and image from my computer into twincat3 for testing purposes before our camera gets in from shipping. All I want to be able to do is to add a png or jpeg and be able to call it to analyze it with contour image processing. Is adding an image pool to the GVL the correct way to go about uploading an image to twincat without the camera?

I was looking at this:
and noticed the the icon for your ImagePool global variable is different from the one shown in that tutorial. I wonder if ImagePool is defined the way you need it to be.

The ImagePool in Codesys isn't a Function Block it's just a collection (table) of image files, which are normally used in Visualization (Web or Target Visu). It seems it's the same in TwinCat as well.

https://infosys.beckhoff.com/english.php?content=../content/1033/tc3_plc_intro/2527010955.html&id=

As far as I understand you need some kind of library which can do image processing with FB's that can take image files as inputs and then produce some results after analyzing the images.
I have played a little bit with Matlab image processing libraries and OpenCV for Python and this is how it's works.

I think you need to take a look at the links below:

http://www.pc-control.net/pdf/022019/products/pcc_0219_twincat_vision_e.pdf

https://www.beckhoff.com/en-en/support/webinars/webinar-detail_10243.html

https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/prod...cat-3-functions/tf7xxx-tc3-vision/tf7100.html