Keynotes address geopolitical and socio-economic topics | Pre-booking of B2B-meetings amongst attendees | Last minute seats available

Barcelona, June 6th, 2024. In just about one week the 22nd EMVA Business Conference begins. From 13 – 15 June CEOs and other decision makers from machine vision enterprises and institutes will meet in Gdansk, Poland. Until now around 100 participants from 14 nations have registered.

Amongst the highlights of this unique conference format are the two keynotes which traditionally address superordinate topics that also affect the vision-tech industry. The opening keynote this year is titled ‘Shifting Quicksands: The Impact of the U.S. Election on Geopolitical Stability’ and will be given by Ms. Sudha David-Wilp, Regional Director & Senior Fellow at German Marshall Fund. The closing keynote will be held by Prof. Dominik Bösl, Expert in Robotic Governance and Artificial Intelligence and is titled ’Managing Disruptive Trends: What GPT, Robotics, AI, and Home Office Have in Common – and What They Don’t?’.

Besides of attractive and informative talks the EMVA Business Conference is recognized as a quite special event in the machine vision calendar because of the extraordinary networking opportunities offered. The networking character is actively fostered by the option to pre-book face-to-face meetings amongst attendees, usually representing top-level management positions in their enterprise. On top, the evening socializing events offer plenty of opportunities to connect with other participants in a pleasant atmosphere.

A few remaining conference tickets are available for spontaneous registrants who don’t want to miss this exclusive gathering of decision makers in the machine vision industry. www.business-conference-emva.org.

Joint member booth and forum session with machine vision applications for logistics

 Barcelona,​ Januar 15^th, 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 19^th – 21^st, 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 19^th 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.

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:

• ‘A professionally organized event with high-tech topics about everything that is related to perfect image acquisition, analysis and interpretation and how the technology is evolving. Besides, this year’s location in Wageningen was a unique deep dive into top notch research about vision tech in the agricultural sector and meeting the people behind it.’
• ‘I learned of machine vision research and applications I was not really aware of, so this is an excellent opportunity to brainstorm and to target new application fields. We already look forward to participating in the European Machine Vision Forum next year.’

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.

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 8^th, 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.

The next EMVA Business Conference will take place in Gdansk

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