[ideasrule]

The default ellipse detection method gets the luminance plane and passes that to imaqdetectEllipse. I found out last year that the conversion from RGB is HSL is very time-consuming. The math isn't hard, but every single pixel of every single frame has to be converted, which takes a significant amount of time. Passing one of the red/green/blue planes to imaqdetectEllipse should decrease processing time dramatically.

Also, you probably don't want to find ellipses only 3 pixels across. Try setting the minimum minor & major axes to 10. Otherwise, the code will pick up a lot of false positives.

Another thing: what do you want the code to do? If it's just picking up the vision target, the edge threshold can be set much higher. If you want to pick up soccer balls, your current edge threshold is fine.