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Automate, Automatica and Embedded World in June’22

This June saw an impressive density of trade shows taking place even in parallel on different show grounds.

During Automate 2022 in Detroit the first G3* plugfest since October 2019 took place for the machine vision standards GenICam, GigE-Vision und USB3-Vision. A plugfest enables testing any exciting or new device with most worldwide available host-applications for interoperability. As the plugfest attendance is limited to members in the standard working groups and/or programmers from the involved companies, problems may be discussed and sometimes even solved short-term. In Detroit, first public tests and demonstrations of the GenICam GenAPI validation suite based on GigE and USB3-Vision cameras were made, running well with the available cameras.

In the trade show halls, an International MV Standards booth with presence of JIIA from Japan featuring CoaXPress, EMVA from Europe featuring GenICam-GenDC and A3 with GEV-U3V got well attended. Moreover, representatives of the G3 associations did a public machine vision standards update in the speaker forum to promote vision standards in the US automation world.

Automatica in Munich is directed to a similar target audience as Automate in North America and also presented the interaction, usage and extension of machine vision products with and in modern production facilities. In general, machine vision products, machine vision extended to AI products and machine vision enhanced robotic products were well structured and perceptible for the trade show visitors. Herein, G3 association partner VDMA focused on its OPC-UA standard which may serve to bridge GenICam for extended use of GenICam based products in modern production environments. Furthermore, G3 member companies addressed machine vision standards in a presentation forum.

Embedded World taking place in parallel to Automatica this year, has a rather different focus pointing more on software, parts, and tools. Still, machine vision companies were to be found all over the show ground as their products are key components for the industry.

Typically, large semiconductor vendors are well represented at Embedded World. Their imaging focus concentrates on embedded vision which is often still out of the standardization sphere. However, since most of these companies are part of the recently founded cooperation between the EMVA and the Khronos Group on an embedded Vision API this might be changing in future.

 

* G3 is a group to coordinate the work on international vision standards formed by the associations A3, CMVU, JIIA, EMVA and VDMA (US, China, Japan, Europe and Germany)

Results from IVSM Spring 2022

Two times a year, the International Vision Standards Meeting (IVSM) gathers machine vision experts in the standard working groups to further develop the most commonly used standards in the machine vision industry. Due to ongoing pandemic restrictions in some parts of the world the last IVSM from 23-27 May once again was held virtual. During the event, major online-meetings took place within the standard working groups of GenICam, OOCI, GigEVision, USB3Vision, CoaXPress and OPC-UA:

  • The GenICam WG has presented and discussed the first version of the GenICam validation framework, which shall enhance GenICam logo certification process and future product compatibility. That validation framework is an independent part of the new test software for GigEVision, USB3Vision and CoaXPress and will be tested in the upcoming Plugfest in Detroit and Tokyo.
  • In addition, GenICam decided on a 2022.06 maintenance release, which is the mainly “GenICam reference implementation v3.4.0” and the 12th maintenance release for GenICam main version 3 since 2016.
  • OOCI started their work on the connectivity between camera and lens with the hardware technologies I2C and single-wire-ethernet and the software technology GenCP, which was and is used in CameraLink products. A first standards draft and demonstrator is expected for the Vision show in Stuttgart in October 2022.
  • GigEVision has finished their work on the GEV2.2 validation framework as well and can release GEV2.2 specification soon, to go on with 10/25Gbit bandwidth extensions in a planned GEV V3 version.
  • CoaXPress has almost completed the updates to the CoaXPress over Fiber document to add support for 25G link speeds. It is also working on a new Validation Framework to improve product validation.
  • OPC-UA has finished formal work on the OPC-UA companion specification and will approach GenICam for the next IVSM to formally include the GenICam concept into the OPC-UA part 2 machine vision framework.

All standards have teamed up and succeeded over the last meetings to enhance common standards testing methods as testing coverage for good product compatibility in the market. The next and hopefully again physical IVSM is scheduled to take place 26-29 September 2022 in Tokyo/Japan.

Relicensing for EMVA 1288 standard use and GenICam Standard Working Group

The EMVA informs that the old EMVA 1288 standard license expired for all users on June 21, 2022. From this date on, new datasheets in which data is designated as EMVA 1288 compatible and marked with the EMVA 1288 logo may only be published if the new EMVA 1288 license has been applied for and approved by the creator of the datasheets. The usage remains free of charge under the new license. The new license application can be downloaded here.

 

Also, the general conditions for participation and thus active involvement in the GenICam standard working group hosted by EMVA have changed, which requires a re-registration for all participating company representatives. Thus, on June 30, 2022, the old membership expires for GenICam working group members and access to the working group, its meetings and documents is only possible after a new registration. The use of the GenICam logo as well as the use of the reference implementation, both available here, will remain free of charge under the new license.

Swiss-based Heliotis AG becomes EMVA member

Heliotis develops, manufactures, and distributes optical 3D measurement technology for industrial quality control. The core competence is in the development of CMOS image sensors, FPGA-based cameras, and optical measurement technology.

Tower Semiconductor joins the EMVA

Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (NASDAQ: TSEM, TASE: TSEM), the leader in high-value analog semiconductor foundry solutions, provides technology and manufacturing platforms for integrated circuits (ICs) in growing markets such as consumer, industrial, automotive, mobile, infrastructure, medical and aerospace and defense.

Karsten Roth wins EMVA Young Professional Award 2022

Next EMVA Business Conference 2023 will be held in Sevilla, Spain celebrating the associations’ 20th anniversary.

Brussels, Belgium; 16 May, 2022. The EMVA Young Professional Award 2022 goes to Karsten Roth for his work “Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection”. The awardee was announced on 13 May during the 20th EMVA Business Conference in Brussels/Belgium, where he also had the opportunity to present his work as part of the regular conference program.

Karsten Roth is a PhD researcher with the Explainable Machine Learning group at the University of Tübingen as part of the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS) and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He is co-supervised by Zeynep Akata and Oriol Vinyals (Deepmind). Karsten has completed both Bachelor and Master studies in Physics at Heidelberg University in 2021, and has spent time abroad in Canada as a researcher at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and the Vector Institute in Toronto, working on all manners of representation learning. He has also worked as a research intern at the Amazon AWS research lablet in Tuebingen on Anomaly Detection.

Awarded Work: Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection
Automated industrial anomaly detection and visual inspection for manufacturing is one of the most successful applications of computer vision in industry with significant return-on-investment, as being able to spot defective parts is a critical component in large-scale industrial manufacturing. A particular challenge is the cold-start problem, in which a model only has access to nominal (non-defective) example images during training as images of potential downstream defects may not be available, or completely unknown defects may be encountered during production that still need to be detected. Instead of developing handcrafted solutions specific to each task and manufacturing problem, an ideal system should be deployable on arbitrary tasks while achieving state-of-the-art detection performance. In addition, such an anomaly detection system should be scalable, sample-efficient and fast.
As part of the research work, a novel automated visual anomaly detection method – PatchCore – was developed that satisfies all key criteria. In particular, a nominal image is broken down into regions represented by features extracted from standard pretrained deep neural networks. As such, no specific network training has to be performed, which makes PatchCore task agnostic. For all training images, a joint memory is utilized to aggregate all extractable nominal features, which retains a maximal amount of nominal context to make PatchCore as sample-efficient as possible. Scalability and inference speed are subsequently achieved by significantly reducing the memory through an advanced subsampling approach which still retains all relevant information. This memory of “normality” can then be utilized to both determine anomalous images as well as localize anomalous areas efficiently. A large range of experimental studies highlight a significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art at low inference times, matching the performance of competitors with only a fraction of the available data.

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.

Next EMVA Business conference takes place in Seville/Spain
Celebrating its 20th anniversary next year the EMVA will return to its founding county Spain. The next EMVA Business Conference will be held in Seville, the date will be announced soon.

Photo: EMVA Young Professional Award Winner Karsten Roth (left), EMVA President Dr. Chris Yates; Picture source: EMVA


About EMVA The European Machine Vision Association is a non-for-profit and non-commercial association representing the Machine Vision industry in Europe. The association was founded in 2003 to promote the development and use of vision technology in all sectors, and represents members from within Europe, North America, and Asia. The EMVA is open for all types of organizations having a stake in machine vision, computer vision, embedded vision or imaging technologies: manufacturers, system and machine builders, integrators, distributors, consultancies, research organizations and academia. All members – as the 100% owners of the association – benefit from the networking, cooperation, standardization, and the numerous and diverse activities of the EMVA. The EMVA is the host of four global machine vision standards: The two widely established standards GenICam and EMVA 1288 as well as the two standardization initiatives Open Optics Camera Interface (OOCI) and Embedded Vision Interface Standard (emVision).

Agenda for EMVA Business Conference 2022 in Brussels is complete

About 120 participants registered for first physical get-together of machine vision industry in Europe after pandemic break

 Barcelona, Spain; May 5th, 2022. After two virtual editions the first EMVA Business Conference with physical presence from May 12 – 14, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium is going to host about 120 conference delegates. The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) as conference organizer has completed the conference agenda filled with top-notch speakers addressing burning topics in the vision-tech scene and beyond. The opening keynote “The Changing Face of Geopolitics in the 2020’s” given by Sunday Times Editor Peter Conradi who lived in Russia for seven years could not be more relevant in this new stage of European and world history. Guido Hertel who is Partner at AT Kearney examines Resilience in the Manufacturing Industry and the The Impact of Corona and Semiconductor Crises. Furthermore, Tim Baeyens, Chief Strategy Officer of Gpixel will introduce the vivid vision-tech activities in the conference host country Belgium.

The technical part of the conference covers the whole spectrum of vision technology development. Erik Widding, President at Birger Engineering focusses his talk on “Goals and Objectives of Lens Platform Developments”. Industry 4.0 and what it takes to bring it to life with edge devices is in the center of the presentation from Siemens Digital Industries Innovation Manager Boris Scharinger. Shane MacNamara who is Senior Vice President Research & Development at SICK talks about “Challenges and Opportunities in Creating a Broad 3D Vision Portfolio”. Furthermore, image sensor development is addressed in several program items. Pawel Malinowski from IMEC in Belgium talks about “Quantum dots enabling accessible SWIR imaging”. A high caliber panel discussion brings together a group of experts who will share their insights on the future of non-visible imaging which over the past years has seen tremendous progress in the underlying technology as well as understanding of applications where non-visible imaging can add value. The topic is further deepened on the second conference day by Prof. Dr. Bernd Jähne from Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing (HCI) in his talk “The Significant Technical Progress of Non-Visible Image Sensors”.

Cybersecurity and Cybercrime are in the focus both in a conference presentation given by Mark Hebbel, Head of Consultancy and Startup Studio at Chainstep; as well as in the closing keynote from Crime- & Intelligence Analyst and Business Psychologist Mark T. Hofmann.

Another key element of the EMVA Business Conference is the presentation of the EMVA Young Professional Award and an introduction of the awarded work.

Last but not least, the EMVA Business Conference is known to provide plenty of room for networking which is even facilitated by the registration platform where all conference delegates can pre-schedule face-to-face meetings in the conference breaks.

More information and registration at www.business-conference-emva.org.

 

 Picture caption: Opening Keynote speaker Peter Conradi addresses the Changing Face of Geopolitics in the 2020’s; Picture source: Peter Conradi


About EMVA The European Machine Vision Association is a non-for-profit and non-commercial association representing the Machine Vision industry in Europe. The association was founded in 2003 to promote the development and use of vision technology in all sectors, and represents members from within Europe, North America, and Asia. The EMVA is open for all types of organizations having a stake in machine vision, computer vision, embedded vision or imaging technologies: manufacturers, system and machine builders, integrators, distributors, consultancies, research organizations and academia. All members – as the 100% owners of the association – benefit from the networking, cooperation, standardization, and the numerous and diverse activities of the EMVA. The EMVA is the host of four global machine vision standards: The two widely established standards GenICam and EMVA 1288 as well as the two standardization initiatives Open Optics Camera Interface (OOCI) and Embedded Vision Interface Standard (emVision).

EMVA welcomes Photonis Group

PHOTONIS is a global manufacturer of electro-optic solutions used in the detection of ions, electrons, and photons. We develop, produce, and market innovative sensors for detecting and amplifying very low levels of light, charged particles, and radiation. Our products are used in a wide range of applications from night vision to machine vision including analytical instruments.

EMVA starts ‘Member Peer Group’ initiative – 1st meeting on March 3rd

Just recently and in line with its overall goal to continiously offer valuable and beneficial services to member entities, the EMVA introduced a brandnew initiative, the EMVA Peer Group ‘IP-Protection, Patents, and Trolls‘.
The goal behind founding so-called Peer Groups is to offer member exclusive platforms – or one may call it ‘rooms’ – for proactive exchange between professionals of EMVA member oganisations.

After having founded a respective LinkedIn Group as a next step the 1st peer group online meeting has been scheduled now:

Best Practices in Answering Hostile Patent Complaints

March 3rd, 3 p.m. CET

Many Machine Vision companies were recently approached by so-called patent trolls in the US and elsewhere. Such Trolls try to threaten companies of any sizes with filings of alleged patent infringements. The legal fight against such filings creates massive costs for the accused company, irrespective how poorly funded or false such allegations are.

This creates the foundation of Patent Trolls and their business model: They often offer achingly expensive out-of-court settlements along their allegations, which are still less costly for their victims than fighting a patent dispute.

Different players in our industry have made their experiences with hostile patent complaints.
On March 3rd, the EMVA offers all its members an exclusive forum to learn from each other about best practices on how to deal with patent trolls.

Agenda:

  • Introduction (5 minutes, Ronald Mueller, EMVA)
  • Experiences, Do’s, and Don’ts (10 minutes, Basler AG)
  • Discussion about best practices (35 minutes, all)
  • Exchange on next steps (10+ minutes, all)

How to join the online meeting:

  1. Mark your calendar on March 3rd, 3 p.m. CET / 9 a.m. ET
  2. Join the EMVA Peer Group on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12621365/ and
    find the link to register for the Zoom meeting in the first post

Join in and strengthen our Machine Vision community against hostile forces!

Theia Technologies becomes EMVA Member

Theia Technologies applies American innovation with Japanese optics expertise to deliver high performance optics to meet the exacting requirements of machine vision, intelligent transportation, security and other industrial imaging applications.