Common Press Dossier from EMVA and Lakesight Technologies
Stresa, Lago Maggiore; Barcelona; Munich 18 October, 2019. Machine vision engineers from all over the world have gathered from 07-11 October in Stresa/Italy at the shore of Lago Maggiore for the International Vision Standards Meeting (IVSM) Fall 2019. This meeting takes place twice a year under the global G3 initiative which is supported by the machine vision associations AIA, CMVU, EMVA, JIIA and VDMA. Hosting association in Stresa was the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) together with the corporate sponsor Lakesight Technologies. Birger Engineering and iMGAGE S were co-sponsors of the event.
IVSM agenda Standard Working Groups; Plugfest; and FSF
Each machine vision standard has its own working group which works continuously on the further development of the standard. Standard group members are engineers from machine vision companies and machine vision scientists. They meet personally twice a year during the IVSM. At the fall 2019 IVSM in Stresa meetings took place from the standard working groups of CameraLink, CameraLink HS, CoaXPress, emVISION, GenICam, OOCI, and OPC-UA Vision.
All standard working groups are open for new members who are interested to contribute with their experience.
One highlight of each International Vision Standard Meeting is the so-called Plugfest. During this event it is possible to test any exciting or new device with most worldwide available host-applications for interoperability. As the Plugfest attendance is restricted to people from the standard working groups and/or programmers from the involved companies most problems can be discussed and sometimes even solved short-term without the usual barriers where these engineers meet such as during trade shows or in a customer usage situation. The Plugfest has its roots in the development of the GenICam standard and nowadays includes practically all machine vision interface standards present during an IVSM.
Last but not least, the Future Standards Forum (FSF) in its General Meeting session gives an update on all current machine vision standards as well as an outlook on the date and place of the forthcoming International Vision Standard Meetings which are always presented by the respective hosting associations.
EMVA and Lakesight Technologies underline importance of standardization
Even after many years in the standardization community EMVA Standards Manager Werner Feith was once again impressed about the growing number of participants and the high-level output of the meeting. “Looking at the manpower and effort put into standardization makes clear that machine vision standardization cannot be taken for granted. A lot of industries look with envy at the level of commonly developed standards in the machine vision industry, where even engineers from competing companies jointly work together in the various standard working groups”, says Feith and adds: “As a machine vision association being part of the global G3 initiative the support of standardization activities is written in EMVA’s DNA. One cannot overestimate the value standardization has brought to our industry by means of facilitating machine vision applications and thus customer adoption of the technology; but also avoiding double developments.”
Lakesight Technologies as first time corporate IVSM sponsor in Stresa is equally satisfied after one week of intensive discussions about machine vision standardization. “Organizing and hosting the IVSM in Stresa was an experience of its own kind. We are glad that Lakesight Technologies was given this opportunity. Witnessing the serious progress that was made in the various standard working groups by technicians from all parts of the world at this fall gathering we realized it was the right decision”, says Lakesight’s CEO Business Unit Vision Solutions Martin Hund and adds: “Our engagement was also a statement that despite the current phase of ongoing market consolidation progress in standardization can only continue through further cooperation. There is absolutely no reason to question the intensive collaboration taking place during the International Vision Standard Meetings.”
The EMVA hosts several machine vision standards, namely the two widely established standards GenICam and EMVA 1288. In addition to that two new standard initiatives were adopted recently. One is the Open Optics Camera Interface (OOCI) standard to control the camera optics through GenCP and SFNC. The second standard initiative is called emVision and aims to expand the application of GenICam into the embedded vision world combining the particularities of the machine vision industry and the embedded world.
Standards Chair discussion round
EMVA and Lakesight Technologies took the opportunity to invite all standard Chairs and Co-Chairs present in Stresa to a round table discussing how standardization has influenced the machine vision industry and what challenges lie ahead.
All Chairs agreed that GenICam has become the backbone within the standardization in the last years since nowadays all other machine vision hardware interface standards refer to GenICam as the widely established generic programming interface for all kinds of devices, framegrabber and applications.
It was also common sense that standardization has been and still is a big enabler for machine vision technology, since machine vision standards simplify adoption of machine vision technology. Standards reduce learning costs for customers and development costs for companies. This allows the vendors, the integrators, and the end users to focus on their unique aspects, and not waste resources on the mundane.
One point made in the Chair session how standardization has changed within the years was in the trend towards software standardization, whereas in former years hardware used to be in the center of standardization activities.
Looking into the future of machine vision standardization the Chairs stated that standards can never be an end in itself but instead need to undergo constant evolution both to test and ensure compatibility of new components as well as to adapt components to new and different market needs. In contrary to the successful plug-and-play approach of existing GeniCam standardization new players such as from the embedded market might be vertically layered instead of horizontally and have less need to integrate interfaces from existing component producers. Also, the current market consolidation might lead to a smaller product variety and thus to less demand for standardization.
However, cooperation amongst the existing machine vision standards but also new alliances with standards from related industries was seen to become more and more important by the Chairs. As it was put by one participant of the Chairs session: “We have to reinvent standardization again and again”; and referring to cooperation with standards from other industries: “We should be thrilled when another standard comes along to be used for a higher growing marketplace.”
Next IVSM
The International Vision Standard Meeting Spring 2020 will take place May 25 – 29 in Montreal/Canada.
About EMVA:
Founded in May 2003 in Barcelona, the European Machine Vision Association currently has about 120+ members representing more than 20 nations. Its aim is to promote the development and use of machine vision technology and to support the interests of its members – machine vision companies, research institutions and national machine vision associations. The main fields of work of EMVA are: standardization, statistics, the annual EMVA Business Conference and other networking events, European research funding, public relations and marketing. To find out more visit the web site www.emva.org.
About Lakesight Technologies:
Lakesight Technologies Holding GmbH, based in Munich, part of the Dutch stock listed company TKH Group, enables customers to fully automate processes. This is achieved by vision systems for inspection, measurement, verification, recognition, and process control via analyses of color, 2D-and 3D-shape as well as the material structure. With its six highly complementary member companies Allied Vision, Chromasens, Mikrotron, NET, SVS-Vistek and Tattile, Lakesight follows its vision to evolve as the technology leader in the machine vision industry for smart solutions. For more information visit www.lakesighttechnologies.com.
The well-chosen conference venue is the beautiful premises the Palais de la Bourse, the historic stock market in the heart of the city. Shortly before finalizing the program, the latest amendment was a “French Evening” presentation block covering machine vision activities in the hosting country. Four presentations from lighthouse institutions in French machine vision research and education will give insights in their fields of activity, namely the technology cluster Minalogic; LIRIS institute which is linked to University of Lyon; The French School for Vision Telecom Saint-Etienne & University Jean Monnet; and CEA-Leti institute based in Grenoble.
Werner Feith received his education from TU München as a solid state physicist. After some time with industrial computer industry he founded Sensor to Image GmbH, which started as a frame grabber company, but was soon tuned to be an FPGA IP company supporting digital camera interfaces defined by Gen<I>cam standard. Sensor to Image became and is the world leader in industrial camera interface IP supporting GigEVision, USB3-Vision and CoaXPress. After selling Sensor to Image in 2017 Werner Feith was attracted by the open position as EMVA Standards Manager to continue his career in the industry and share his vast experience in standardization.
Objects made from transparent materials play crucial roles in humans’ everyday life. They are employed, e.g., as windshields, glasses or as plastic lenses to guide laser beams in an eye surgery. Especially when considering the latter example, it is obvious, that such objects must meet high quality requirements. Hence, a visual inspection for material defects like enclosed air bubbles or surface scratches is inevitable. Human visual inspection is a fatiguing task which is not very robust and prone to subjective results or even to unrevealed defects. Automated visual inspection systems represent a reliable alternative to manual inspection. However, the automated inspection of complex-shaped transparent objects like lenses, windshields etc. still represents a challenging task with several open research questions.
Dr. Bernd Liepert is the President of euRobotics aisbl, the international non-profit association for all stakeholders in European robotics, which was founded in September 2012 and has become the private side of SPARC, the European Public-Private Partnership in Robotics in 2013. As president of these associations, Dr. Liepert has been leading the European robotics community and representing it at high political levels since 2008, where he became President of EUROP, the European Robotics Technology Platform.
In the afternoon session of the first conference day, Prof. Dr. Christian Wolf, Associate Professor at INSA, Université de Lyon and LIRIS, CNRS highlights reasoning as a key component of human intelligence in his speech “Learning High-Level Reasoning in and from Images”.
Barcelona/Suzhou (China), 08 April, 2019. During the meeting of the GenICam Standard Group end of March in Suzhou/China the Chair and Vice-Chairs were elected for another regular three year period. The previous incumbents were unanimously re-elected. Dr. Fritz Dierks (Basler) remains Chairman of the GenICam Standard Group and is assisted by the three Vice-Chairmen Rupert Stelz (STEMMER IMAGING), Stéphane Maurice (Matrox Imaging) and Christoph Zierl (MVTec Software).
