Standardization is the key to the success of machine vision technology. Machine vision standards are commonly developed in the standard working groups and here by dedicated individuals. The EMVA interview series ‘Faces of Machine Vision Standards‘ introduces engineers having joined a standard working group and talk about their motivation to contribute and which experience they take out for their daily work.
EMVA recently spoke with GenICam working group member Roman Moie, Product Owner Interfaces at MVTec Software GmbH:
Why do you participate in the GenICam WG?
When working on software, there is a permanent danger of getting too comfortable in the developer bubble and losing the contact to the outside world. Our products can however only succeed if we continuously gather and consider all kinds of suggestions from our customers and partners. So, I was very lucky to get the opportunity to represent MVTec at the vision standards and network with many other companies there. Working with the GenICam WG means working with some of the greatest experts of the whole machine vision industry. Besides the high quality standards that result from our work, we all continuously learn from the exchange of ideas and fruitful discussions. Collaboration rather than pure competition also reflects my personal values.
Which GenICam parts do you intend to shape with your input?
MVTec has been part of the GenApi release team ever since the beginning. This means that we work with the other release team members to get all the code changes ready and generate the release package. Later, MVTec donated the so called GenTL Producer Framework to the GenICam WG which provides a powerful starting point for the development of new GenTL Producers. This framework has become an official module of the GenICam standard and as its maintainer, I collect and prioritize change requests and propose releases when there is enough progress made. In a recent initiative, we have been working with a subgroup of interested companies to overcome the limitations of the GenApi. This initiative aims at making GenICam attractive for a wider range of technologies and reducing complexity of both implementation and usage.
How does your company benefit from your WG participation?
MVTec is a leading international manufacturer of software for machine vision. One of our big selling points is easy-to-use interoperability with a wide range of hardware components. If you imagine the machine vision market as x camera manufacturers and y software manufacturers, interoperability in a world without standards requires a lot of effort. Each software manufacturer needs to develop x pieces of code to interface with each camera manufacturer Software Development Kit (SDK), making a total of x times y interfaces to be developed to enable all combinations. By introducing a standard that all companies in the market adhere to, each manufacturer needs to interface with only one standard anymore and the total number of interfaces reduces to x plus y. During my years at MVTec, I have seen this effect happen very practically and I have also seen that the saved efforts are reinvested in a better software quality and user experience for our common customers.
What was your biggest light bulb moment in the GenICam collaboration?
When the semiannual International Vision Standards Meeting was suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic, I noticed how helpful it had been for my daily work to talk to the other experts. This kind of exchange happens throughout the meeting weeks whenever there is a little spare time in between. Thanks to virtual meetings, the work on the standards continued but all those informal offline conversations were missing a lot. That’s why I’m happy that we can now meet in person again.
