Companies, universities and institutes interested to present their most recent developments and research results at the 2024 European Machine Vision Forum are invited to prepare their application now.
The Call for Contributions is open and the forum’s advisory board is looking forward to YOUR application.
Joint member booth and forum session with machine vision applications for logistics
Barcelona, Januar 15th, 2024. Image processing has established itself in many areas of logistics. Image processing solutions, better known as machine vision or vision tech, are an integral part of fast barcode scanning, determining the size of parcels and goods and autonomous transport systems, among other applications.
Together with seven member companies and for the first time, the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) will be present with a joint booth at this year’s LogiMAT from March 19th – 21st, 2024 at Messe Stuttgart, located in hall 2, booth no. 2C18. The co-exhibiting companies and institutes are Advantech; Fraunhofer IFF; Murrelektronik; Phil-vision; Roboception; Vecow und Vision Components. They will be showcasing applied image processing solutions for a wide range of requirements in logistics.
Furthermore, an expert forum titled “Machine Vision – Key for Logistics 4.0” will take place on Tuesday, March 19th from 3:00 p.m. to 3:50 p.m., which will be moderated by EMVA board member Dr. Ronald Müller. During the forum, several machine vision company representatives will highlight various approaches to more automation, speed and safety in logistics thanks to modern camera systems. Admission to this forum is included in the entrance tickets to the trade fair.
The EMVA Young Professional Award is an annual award endowed with 1500 Euros to honor the outstanding and innovative work of a student or a young professional in the field of machine vision or image processing.
It is the goal of the European Machine Vision Association EMVA to support further innovation in our industry, to contribute to the important aspect of dedicated machine vision education, and to provide a bridge between research and industry.
Event will take place again in 2024
Barcelona/Wageningen, October 19th, 2023. The European Machine Vision Forum offers a unique platform in Europe for machine vision researchers and industry representatives to exchange ideas and discuss possible collaboration. More than 100 participants gathered at the 6th European Machine Vision Forum 2023 in Wageningen on October 12th and 13th.
The three keynotes at the event each highlighted a scientific image processing sub-discipline. Amongst them, the presentation by Christophe Cudel, professor at the Université de Haute Alsace, on light field cameras for visual navigation showed the maturity and suitability of light field cameras, despite all the technological challenges. The keynote by Alfred M. Bruckstein, professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, on ‘Random Dot Videos’ illustrated how powerful the human visual system is and how this can trigger technical implementation using machine vision technology. The presentation by Albert Theuwissen, CEO & founder of Harvest Imaging, on ‘Stacked Image Sensors’ demonstrated very clearly how image sensors, and probably soon also machine vision applications, benefit from the technical progress of the semiconductor industry.
Machine Learning has been a frequently addressed technology at the European Machine Vision Forum this year. Particularly in unstructured environments, such as in agriculture or industrial production, machine learning methods help to deal with variability. However, the presentations on machine learning also made very clear what prerequisites must be in place for its use. First and foremost, this includes suitable training data, which can now also be generated with the help of artificial intelligence, but which requires corresponding (human) expertise. All these contributions were particularly relevant to this year’s focus topic ‘Real-world Machine Vision Challenges – Coping with Variability and Uncontrolled Environments’.
Of central importance at this annual gathering of academic research and industry is the content quality of the lecture program. ‘All speakers excelled with methodologically interesting, novel contributions. The program included diverse methods, from sensor technology to mathematical modeling and machine learning to robotics integration. In addition, a wide variety of applications were addressed, including automation technology, agriculture and food production, logistics and traffic’, confirms Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael Heizmann, Chairman of the European Machine Vision Forum and Head of the Institute for Industrial Information Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
In addition, this year’s host – Wageningen University & Research – provided a deep insight into the wide range of machine vision developments in the field of agriculture, such as in large-scale plant growth monitoring and state-of-the-art 3D crop detection, or the hands-on demonstration of quality inspection of fruits such as apples. The insight into the laboratories and short presentations of companies located on the WUR Campus became another enrichment of the European Machine Vision Forum 2023.
Following the great success of the event format, ‘Research Meets Industry’ will be repeated next year. Location and date for the 7th European Machine Vision Forum will be announced soon.
Participants’ feedback on the European Machine Vision Forum 2023 in Wageningen:
About the European Machine Vision Forum
The European Machine Vision Forum is an annual event of the European Machine Vision Association – EMVA. The aim is to foster interaction between the machine vision industry and academic research to learn from each other, discuss the newest research results as well as challenges from applications, learn about emerging application fields, and to discuss research cooperation between industry and academic institutes. The overall aim is to accelerate innovation by translating new research results faster into practice. The forum is directed to scientists, development engineers, software and hardware engineers, and programmers both from research and industry.
LogiMAT 2024 – International Trade Show for Intralogistics Solutions and Process Management will take place 19 – 21 March 2024 in Stuttgart, Germany.
The EMVA offers all its members the exclusive opportunity to be part of this successful and globally recognised trade show.
From 4-6 May 2023 the vision community met in Seville, Spain, for the annual EMVA highlight event and at this occasion celebrating EMVA’s 20th anniversary. Around 110 registered conference attendees enjoyed an highly interesting conference program and used the excellent networking opportunities to exchange ideas and discuss new business cases.
Awarded work “Advanced deep learning for harvest robotics” presented at EMVA Business Conference in Seville. Next conference 2024 will take place in Gdansk.
Seville, Spain; May 8th, 2023. The EMVA Young Professional Award 2023 goes to Dr. Pieter Blok for his work “Advanced deep learning for harvest robotics”. The awardee was announced on 05 May during the 21th EMVA Business Conference in Seville/Spain, where he also had the opportunity to present his work as part of the regular conference program. Pieter Blok is a researcher Deep Learning and Computer Vision at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. Pieter holds a Bachelor and Master of Sciences in Agricultural Engineering from Wageningen University. In December 2022, he obtained his PhD degree at Wageningen University with the thesis entitled “Perception models for selective harvesting robots in fruit and vegetable production”. This PhD thesis was awarded the distinction cum laude. From July 1st, 2023, Pieter will continue his scientific career as an assistant professor at the Laboratory of Field Phenomics at the University of Tokyo in Japan. In Tokyo, Pieter will focus on machine learning and image processing technologies for plant phenotyping.
Awarded Work: Advanced deep learning for harvest robotics
Manual harvesting of fruits and vegetables is a labor-intensive task that suffers from the current shortage of labor in agriculture. To prevent this labor shortage from leading to a reduced supply of fruits and vegetables, robotic alternatives are currently being sought. For a robot to successfully harvest a crop, the fruits and vegetables must be detected using computer vision methods. Unfortunately, to date, most computer vision methods are unable to perform generically when deployed in different fields. This is unfavorable for the commercial success of these robots.
The goal of Pieter Blok’s PhD thesis was to research and develop new machine vision methods that can help a harvesting robot to deal with the mentioned variations and uncertainties. The focus of the PhD thesis was on three tasks that must be performed by every harvesting robot: crop detection, crop size estimation, and crop quality determination.
In the context of crop detection, Blok’s thesis focused on improving the generalization performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to deal with variations within the same crop. Usually, there are many variations within a crop, which can cause the trained CNN to not be able to generalize sufficiently. Therefore, Blok’s research focused on applying different types of data augmentation to optimize the training of a CNN. With geometric data augmentation (rotation, cropping, and scaling of the image), it was demonstrated that the CNN could better generalize to multiple crop varieties.
Another research topic in Blok’s thesis focused on improving the size estimation of crops. Size estimation is important for a harvesting robot, as it determines whether a crop should be harvested or left in the field to grow further. A challenge, however, when estimating the size of a crop is that crops can be occluded by leaves, which reduces the visibility of the crop. Blok introduced a new perception method to alleviate this problem. His novel method used amodal perception, which is the ability to predict both the visible and occluded parts of objects in an image. By integrating this into a CNN, the larger amodal shape of occluded crops could be accurately estimated for three-dimensional crop size estimation and robot positioning.
The third research topic in Blok’s PhD thesis focused on crop quality determination. Specifically, it focused on using active learning to automatically select and annotate sporadically occurring plant diseases. The newly developed active learning method used the output of the CNN to select unlabeled images about which the network was most uncertain. These selected images were then interactively labelled in a semi-supervised way and used to retrain the network. This active learning method significantly reduced the annotation effort by 1400 image annotations, respectively 120 annotation hours.
The application of Blok’s deep learning technologies to five harvesting robots has enabled the successful commercialization of these robots, thus achieving a unique technology transfer from science to industry.
About the EMVA Young Professional Award
The EMVA Young Professional Award is an annual award to honor the outstanding and innovative work of a student or a young professional in the field of machine vision or image processing. It is the goal of the European Machine Vision Association EMVA to further support innovation in the machine vision industry, to contribute to the important aspect of dedicated machine vision education and to provide a bridge between research and industry. With the annual Young Professional Award the EMVA intends to specifically encourage students to focus on challenges in the field of machine vision and to apply latest research results and findings in computer vision to the practical needs of the industry. The Award winner is presented during the EMVA Business Conference.
Traditionally, at the end of the conference it was announced in which city the next, then 22nd EMVA Business Conference will take place. The machine vision industry will meet June 13 – 15, 2024 in Gdansk/Poland.
Photo: EMVA Young Professional Award Winner Dr. Pieter Blok (left), EMVA President Dr. Chris Yates; Picture source: EMVA
With standards working group meetings, Future Standards Forum and Plugfest the spring International Vision Standards Meeting laid once again the foundation for interoperability of cameras, systems and software.
Vienna/Barcelona, April 28th, 2023. More than 100 developers from Europe, North America and Asia representing about forty machine vision companies met during the spring edition of the International Vision Standards Meeting (IVSM) from 17-20 April in Vienna which was hosted by the EMVA and the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) where the event was held. The International Vision Standards Meeting combines the global machine vision standardization efforts and goes back two decades to the kick-off meeting for the GigE Vision standard in June 2003. Since then, the supporting associations A3 (North America), CMVU (China), EMVA (Europe), JIIA (Japan), and VDMA (Germany) alternate as hosts for the biannual meetings.
Standardization as the basis for success for machine vision breakthrough
EMVA Standards Manager Werner Feith points out the meaning of the biannual standards meetings to the entire industry. ‘Alone in Europe and North America vision-tech in 2022 has generated some 3.8 billion Euros and 3.1 billion US$, respectively. Standardization, which becomes clearly visible at the IVSM meeting, lays the foundation of all this as it generates compatibility amongst products which are being sold into multiple industries. Such customer as engineering value generated for the entire industry during the semi-annual IVSM as the vision-tech heart chamber cannot be overestimated.’
The event was a complete success for both EMVA and AIT. Markus Clabian, Head of the High-Performance Vision Systems research group at the Center for Vision, Automation & Control (VAC), comments: ‘For us, it was a strategic decision to host the IVSM. Our aim is to significantly increase the visibility of AIT and our technologies in the professional community, demonstrating the deep expertise in the field of machine vision at the AIT Center for Vision, Automation & Control. In addition, as a research and development organization, the exchange with experts is crucial to us, not only on a professional level but also to understand the needs of the market. At the IVSM we talked to the experts and companies from China, Japan, Canada, USA, Belgium, Germany, and many more, and discussed opportunities for collaboration. Thirdly, during the tours through various AIT Labs, we were able to show different innovative application fields of machine vision, where vision standards clearly demonstrate its value.’
Christoph Zierl, Vice-Chair of the GenICam Standard and Director Organization Development of MVTec Software GmbH, is equally satisfied with the outcomes of the International Vision Standards Meeting in Vienna: ‘The plugfest on April 18th has shown again that cross-vendor practical testing of interoperability between cameras and software applications is indispensable. The GenICam Working Group, newly formed on a sound legal basis, now again comprises about 45 companies with a total of more than 150 involved members, including some new members. GenICam is the basis for plug&play operation of cameras and devices in industrial image processing. All hardware interface standards represented at the IVSM build on this standard. Closer cooperation was agreed between the GenICam and EMVA1288 standards in a joint working meeting of both standards committees here in Vienna.’ For Christoph Zierl, all this shows the immense importance of the biannual meetings for the further development of the entire industry.
Plugfest: live tests for software and components compatibility and interoperability
The ‘Plugfest’ is a special highlight at each meeting, where experts apply the standards and connect a wide range of products, some of which are new. Reynold Dodson is President of the company BitFlow and Chair of the CameraLink standard, as well as a member of the CoaXPress working group. He describes the plugfest function as an important part of the meeting: ‘In the machine vision industry, a plugfest is chance for all the firms that work on the standard to test the interoperability of their products. These plugfests serve a number of purposes, they improve specifications, they provide a venue for mandatory interoperability testing and they tighten and enhance the social aspects of standards creation. The ultimate goal of plugfests, like the standards they exercise, is to improve the customer experience. For CoaXPress, this was the first year that products were required to pass a validation framework, which presented some new challenges, but which will ultimately strengthen market confidence in the standard.” During the meeting in Vienna, the plugfest for the first time was opened to the professional community outside the companies and institutions involved in the standards working groups.
EMVA Standards Manager Werner Feith also thanks the organization partner AIT where the event was held: ‘It was a great pleasure for the standards community to be guest in Vienna and we are grateful about the support given by the Austrian Institute of Technology.’
A summary of the decisions made in the working groups for the various machine vision standards will be published on a separate occasion.
The press release of our cooperation partner AIT about this event can be found at https://www.ait.ac.at/media/presseaussendungen.
Focal topic
Real-world Machine Vision Challenges –
Coping with Variability and Uncontrolled Environments
Barcelona, March 1st, 2023. The EMVA invites interested persons to submit their extended abstract via this Application Form for a contributed talk or poster during the 6th European Machine Vision Forum taking place October 12-13, 2023, in Wageningen, The Netherlands. Under the slogan “Research Meets Industry”, researchers and developers from machine vision, computer vision, machine learning, applied optics and photonics meet at the forum to exchange their newest ideas. Submission of extended abstracts for a contributed talk or poster shall be sent no later than May 2nd, 2023. All submissions are openly reviewed by the joint Scientific and Industrial Advisory Board of the forum.
Following some background on the forum’s focal topic in 2023 Real-world Machine Vision Challenges – Coping with Variability and Uncontrolled Environments:
Machine vision solutions provide great value to end-users, but also must function well in real-world environments like agriculture, environmental monitoring, industrial and medical applications. Depending on the application at hand, specific challenges arise which concern the variability of the vision task as well as possible disturbances or operational conditions, for example:
In consequence, real-world machine vision systems must be able to deal with such undesired variability. Approaches which are conceivable to address the issues include questions regarding the hardware and software design of machine vision systems; what hardware combinations are robust to a large variety of disturbances or interference; suitable preprocessing and evaluation methods; but also how machine learning can be used and adapted in such cases. Furthermore, aspects such as whether simulations can be used to model the physics of real-world scenarios; the trade-off between robustness and accuracy; and how the reliability of machine vision systems can be assessed and specified when variabilities and disturbances are present could be taken into account as well.
The Call for Contributions and further details on the 2023 forum may be found at www.emva.org as well as at www.european-forum-emva.org.
Topic: Machine Vision Enabling Logistics 4.0
Barcelona, February 23rd, 2023. The EMVA is proud to announce a series of vision-tech presentations during LogiMAT – International Trade Fair for Intralogistics Solutions and Process Management at Stuttgart Trade Fair Center. Under the title ‘Machine Vision Enabling Logistics 4.0’ four machine vision enterprises will present solutions specifically shaped to the requirements in logistics. The forum session takes place on Tuesday, 25 April 2023 from 3:00 – 3:50 p.m. and covers the following speeches:
‘Digitization of the logistics market is a macro trend with profound implications for supply chain management, material handling and warehouse operations. Machine vision is making an important contribution to the implementation of this transformation by supporting solutions for identification, tracking, measurement, robot guidance and many other important tasks. In this forum, EMVA will present the most exciting vision tech applications for logistics,‘ confirms EMVA Business Development Manager Oliver Scheel, who will moderate the forum.
The event is free of charge for LogiMAT trade fair visitors. A registration is not required.
