More than 100 participants from 20 countries attended the 12th EMVA Business Conference which was held in Vienna 15-17 May 2014.
As in the previous years, the well-balanced mixture of high-level speeches and networking opportunities in an attractive conference location was valued by the participants.
European economy, machine vision markets in Europe, enterprise’s IT security, business strategy and state of the art image processing technology in our industry were the main topics of the presentations.
source: Mr. Dirk Schaar, Vereinigte Fachverlage GmbH
The conference program was marked by top-notch speakers covering topics such as the keynote speaker Jan Meister, founder and managing director of Meritum Capital Managers who analyzed and gave a useful insight into the European economy and the challenges to be managed.
Andreas Vrabl from AIT Austrian Institute of Technology provided an update on the machine vision market in Austria. Vrabl mentioned that Austria machine vision market lacks dominant broad components suppliers, but has a handful of established machine vision integrators.
A technical presentation on the topic of embedded vision was given by Ivo Bolsens from Xilinx explaining that pixel processing rates are increasing exponentially and FPGAs were the most appropriate platform to deal with this. Bolsens concluded by saying that FPGA technology has changed and should be revisited as a targeted platform for smart vision applications.
A presentation from a Spanish applied research center Tecnalia was given by Carlos Calleja explaining how the project ‘bio inspired system for color image processing’ seeks to apply lessons learned from neuroscience to develop new algorithms that will improve the quality of color information through image processing.
The afternoon sessions started with EMVA president Toni Ventura talking about 3D vision for metrology and explaining that the development chain starts with CAD design then CAM for manufacture with the ‘digital part’ forming a new, third step.
Jochem Hermann, EMVA board member provided an update on machine vision standards. Hermann mentioned that there is a future standards forum to debate the needs for new standards and plan appropriate road maps.
The afternoon session was concluded by a presentation of Dr. Alberto Broggi from University of Parma on autonomous vehicles using vision and by a presentation of Dr. Martin Pattera on job-to-be-done thinking advices.
The gala dinner took place at Palais Liechtenstein, a magnificent historical building and one of two palaces in Vienna belonging to the Princely Family of Liechtenstein.
The second day of the conference started with a statistics update from EMVA general manager Thomas Lübkemeier and Andreas Breyer.
Arun Chhabra from 8tree was the second speaker on how 8tree revisited the process of 3D optical measurement, concentrating on ease and speed of use.
The EMVA Young Professional Award 2014 was announced and a presentation of the winner was made. The YPA award went to Jakob Engel, PhD Student in the Computer Vision Group at the Technical University of Munich, Germany for his novel approach to real-time visual odometry for a monocular camera.
The last presentation of the conference was given by Graham Cluley on cybercrime and how the enterprises are fighting a new internet enemy.
At the closing of the conference EMVA General Manager Thomas Lübkemeier announced that with Athens the Greek capital will be the location for the EMVA Business Conference.
General Assembly 2014 confirms new EMVA-Board members
The EMVA members during this years’ General Assembly have approved the preliminary board decisions and elected Jean Caron and Michel Ollivier into the EMVA Board of Directors. Jean Caron is Vice President Sales and Support, Machine Vision Components at Belgium frame grabber specialist EURESYS. Michel Ollivier is member of the Executive Board at TIAMA Group and he signs responsible for Tiama’s R&D activities. He has been asked by the Board to join the Committee already last year and since then taken the responsibilities as a Board member.
The General Assembly was held 15 May during the 12th EMVA Business Conference in Vienna/Austria.
