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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.

Emergent Vision joins EMVA

Emergent Vision Technologies was founded in 2007 in Vancouver, Canada. We are the first providers of cameras based on the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GigE), 25 Gigabit Ethernet (25GigE), 50 Gigabit Ethernet (50GigE), and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GigE) interfaces.

Call for Participation New Camera API Working Group

EMVA and Khronos Issue Call for Participation for New Camera API Working Group
Strong industry consensus to develop an open, cross-vendor API standard for portable control over camera systems in multiple markets

Barcelona, Spain / Beaverton, OR, USA; 20 January, 2022. The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), the leading European industry association dedicated to vision technology, announces the formation of a new Working Group together with the Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, to develop an open, royalty-free API standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets. The Working Group will be hosted by the Khronos Group and is the result of an EMVA/Khronos-hosted Exploratory Group, held in 2021, during which over 70 companies participated to develop a Scope of Work document that will guide the direction of the API design. Design work of the Working Group is expected to start in February 2022, and any organization is invited to join to participate.

The background to form this Working Group is that cameras are increasingly critical in diverse industries, motivating the development of increasingly sophisticated optical systems, image sensors and vision processors often utilizing machine learning technology. However, the lack of interoperable camera API standards increases application development time and maintenance costs while reducing portability and opportunity for code reuse, resulting in unnecessarily high integration costs for camera technologies. The new Camera API will be designed to provide applications, libraries and frameworks low-level, explicit control over camera runtimes, with a low-level of abstraction that still provides application portability over a wide variety of camera systems with effective, performant control to generate streams of data for consumption by downstream applications and clients.

“The close and productive collaboration between the EMVA and Khronos has been very effective in enabling broader industry participation and diversity of perspectives at the Embedded Camera Exploratory Group than either organization could have achieved working alone,” said Chris Yates, EMVA president. “EMVA will continue our collaboration with Khronos under a new liaison agreement to ensure that the interests of both the EMVA membership and the wider industry are represented at the new Camera API working group.”

“The Embedded Camera API Exploratory Group followed the Khronos New Initiative Process with invaluable cooperation from the EMVA. Over seventy companies worked together from March to December 2021 to forge strong industry consensus on the need, terminology, scope, requirements and design methodology for a new open standard camera system API,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president. “Now, we warmly invite any interested companies, vendors and developers to bring their voice and their expertise to the design phase of this important work.”

The Camera API Working Group will start meetings in February 2022 and is expected to be of particular interest to sensor or camera manufacturers, silicon vendors, and software developers working on vision and sensor processing. Any organization is welcome to join Khronos and participate in this global initiative under the consortium’s multi-company governance process. More details can be found on the Khronos membership page or through contacting Khronos Membership Services.

Industry Support for the Camera API Working
Over 70 companies participated in the Camera Exploratory group and the following companies support establishing the Camera API Working Group: Adimec, Almalence Inc., Analog Devices Inc., Basler AG, Baumer Optronic GmbH, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Collabora, Digica, Digital Air Technologies, Euresys, European Machine Vision Association, FLIR Integrated Imaging Solutions, Google, Groget, Holochip Corporation, Ideas on Board Oy, LunarG, Inc., MATRIX VISION, MM Solutions, MVTec Software GmbH, NVIDIA, Perey Research & Consulting, Phil-Vision, Pleora Technologies, Raspberry PI Ltd, STEMMER IMAGING, Texas Instruments, VeriSilicon, Vision Components.

<Quotes from any Khronos, EMVA and Exploratory Group Members>
“The generic camera API will help Adimec to focus on our mission to deliver the right image in the right place at the right time, so our customers can focus on their imaging tasks. That is what we call ‘Excellence in Imaging’,” – The Adimec Team.

“Lack of API standards for advanced use of embedded cameras and sensors is an impediment to industry growth, collaboration and innovation. Enterprise AR customers and systems integrators/value added providers will benefit from greater clarity, open interfaces between modular systems and innovation in the component provider ecosystem. This Khronos standard for camera and sensor control will increase opportunities for powerful new combinations of sensor and AR compute resources, integration with existing IT, and lower cost and complexity of future solutions,” Christine Perey, interoperability and standards program leader for the Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA).

“Open interface standards such as GenICam or GigE Vision have been a key element to establish a professional Machine Vision Market. Only by such standards we can ensure the interoperability of products from different vendors. It helped to shorten the development cycles of customers dramatically and also yields in a faster growing market. Therefore we strongly support the new open standard camera API initiative driven by Khronos and the EMVA,” Arndt Bake, CDO, Basler AG.

“Over the past two decades, digital cameras used in embedded applications have changed dramatically. As video capture quality and processing power have increased, so has the potential for enhanced features which were unimaginable in early camera phones. The proliferation of features has resulted in a corresponding plethora of software support. The Embedded Camera Exploratory Group has laid the foundations for a consistent and extensible API to resolve this complexity; Digica is pleased to have contributed to this project and welcomes the development of the API under the new Working Group,” Jim Carroll, CTO, Digica.

“Due to high fragmentation and lack of standardization, the embedded camera space is subject to painful interoperability issues. Adding camera support in a product is complex and expensive, most often subject to vendor lock-in, when not practically impossible for small actors. Ideas on Board launched the libcamera project three years ago to address these issues in the Linux mobile, embedded and desktop ecosystems. We have contributed our experience to the Khronos Camera Exploratory Group, and are looking forward to continuing collaboration with the industry on a new open standard camera API,” said Laurent Pinchart, CEO, Ideas on Board, and lead architect of the libcamera® project.

“Cameras are everywhere and in everything, the market and applications have exploded in the last ten years. But a cohesive set of standard APIs has been slow to emerge making incompatibility challenging. Khronos, in conjunction with the European Machine Vision Association, is going to correct that and has formed this Working Group to develop an open API for cameras. This will be welcome news to industry participants and users alike,” said Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research.

“Existing standards, like GigE Vision and USB3 Vision, have proven that a standardization of software interfaces is beneficial for manufacturers and users. We believe that, in the rapidly changing world, Embedded Vision is significantly shaping the future of machine vision. A complementary standard for the embedded camera API is therefore important, and it makes camera control more reliable, hardware selection more flexible and shortens users’ time-to-market,” said Tilman Sanitz, head of embedded systems, Matrix Vision.

“A widely supported open standard camera API will spur innovation and reduce integration costs in multiple markets that use advanced sensors. NVIDIA has supported the work of the Exploratory Group and is committed to participating in the design work at this new Camera Working Group,” Sean Pieper, director of imaging software, NVIDIA.

“With the strong growth of camera applications in automotive, IoT, AR/VR devices, wearables and smartphones, there has been a strong demand for a standardized camera API in the industry. The standardized camera API that the Khronos group is working on will help facilitate the deployment of new cameras by reducing porting efforts, simplifying the procedures of camera upgrades, and improving the interoperability among various camera devices. This camera API standardization effort is very meaningful and will be highly influential to the related industry. We would like to see this standard API to be deployed soon,” said Weijin Dai, EVP, VeriSilicon.

 

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).

About Khronos

The Khronos Group is an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium of over 180 industry-leading companies creating advanced, royalty-free, interoperability standards for 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, parallel programming, vision acceleration and machine learning. Khronos activities include 3D Commerce™, ANARI™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenCL™, OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, OpenVG™, OpenVX™, OpenXR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, Vulkan®, and WebGL™. Khronos members drive the development and evolution of Khronos specifications and are able to accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. www.khronos.org.
Khronos Group Press Contact:
Caster Communications Inc.; Khronos@castercomm.com

 

EMVA Young Professional Award 2022 – Call for Application

Prestigious industry award rewards outstanding work with prize money, presentation at EMVA Conference in Brussels and free pass for European Machine Vision Forum 2022.

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.
The winner of the award will be announced at the flagship 20th EMVA Business Conference 2022 taking place May 12th – 14th in Brussels, Belgium, and will have the opportunity to present the awarded work to the machine vision industry leaders from Europe and abroad. The presentation will then be published by the international machine vision press.

In addition to the honor of the EMVA Young Professional Award endowed with 1500 Euros and the publicity for the research work is a free conference pass for the EMVA Business Conference as well as the coverage of all travel cost to Brussels and a free pass for the 2022 European Machine Vision Forum in Ireland.


With our award, we would like to specifically encourage students and young scientists 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 our industry. Previous winners of the award have continued to achieve great success in the vision industry and benefited from the high profile the award brings.

The criteria of the works to be presented for the EMVA Young Professional Award are:

  1. Outstanding or innovative work in the field of vision technology. Industrial relevance and collaboration with a company during the work is required. The targeted industry is free of choice.
  2. The work (master thesis or PHD thesis or equivalent level research) must have been undertaken within the last 18 months at, or in collaboration with, a European institution. Meanwhile the student may have entered the professional field.

To apply please submit the following materials to the EMVA President, Dr Chris Yates, at ypa(at)emva.org latest until March 31st, 2022:

  • A two-page abstract summarizing the innovation and the intended commercial benefit
  • A one-page CV
  • A copy of the master thesis or PhD thesis. If not yet finished or under publication restrictions, please provide at least one accepted publication

Supportive letters of research supervisors and/or any collaborating company are welcomed but not mandatory. Among the papers the EMVA Board of Directors, representing the European Machine Vision Industry, will select the winner of the award.

By submitting your application for the Young Professional Award 2022, you agree that we may send you topic-related e-mails in the future. We protect your personal data …
As soon as we have received your application, we will contact you regarding the required application documents for the jury .

 
Statement of Mr. Tolga Birdal, winner of the 2016 Young Professional Award: "In my perspective, the award signifies that the work is of benefit to an important and highly qualified community. This is an invaluable personal reward. Being selected by the renowned EMVA jury legitimises the worth of what I do and gives me huge encouragement. Moreover, the EMVA is made up of individuals and companies from all over Europe, creating an exclusive machine vision network. Getting introduced into such a network is certainly an honour and holds great potential for my future career."
 

Characterization of a CMOS camera

Reworked version of “Characterization of a CMOS Camera, Hands-On”.

Get your seat now for the online training taking place 24 – 25 November 2021.

Speaker is Prof. Dr. Albert Theuwissen, one of the most excellent and renowned experts in the field of imaging.
As a professor at the Delft University of Technology, his main focus was on researching and coaching in the field of imaging.