International experts are invited to join the ISO-TC42-Working Group 28.

Barcelona/Spain, November 22nd, 2024. Based on the positive and ongoing evolution towards more and more matured applications of vision technologies, in specific cameras and image sensors, the EMVA Board of Directors, representing the association’s members, has decided to lift the EMVA 1288 Standard up to an international standardization level. Consequently in 2023 the EMVA proposed the EMVA 1288 Standard to become an ISO Standard. In October 2024 the item proposal got accepted by the ISO Technical Committee 42 ‘Photography’ and the specific working group WG 28 has been founded and initiated its work. International experts are invited to bring in their expertise by joining the ISO-TC42-WG28.

Standards are backbone of machine vision industry
“Establishing international standards has been and will be crucial for the successful application of vision technologies not only in the industrial world but increasingly also in logistics, traffic, medical and several other user segments”, says EMVA General Manager Thomas Lübkemeier. Already in 2005, the first module of the EMVA 1288 Standard was officially released by the members and contributors of the EMVA hosted working group. Meanwhile the ‘Standard for Measurement and Presentation of Specifications for Machine Vision Sensors and Cameras’ continuously has been further developed and the Release 4.1 is close to be finalized. “The EMVA 1288 Standard today is well accepted and especially camera producers worldwide apply the standard in their production lines and quality assurance departments”, Thomas Lübkemeier confirms.

Experts invited to contribute
The ISO – International Organization for Standardization is a network of 172 national standards bodies. ISO members are the foremost standards organizations in their country and there is only one member per country. Each member represents ISO in its country and is entitled to nominate experts into the various ISO working groups.
Experts motivated to share their expertise to the ISO-24942 initiative may find more details on how to join at EMVA’s website and of course via the official ISO channels.

Focal Topic addresses Challenges and Chances in Computer Vision for Human-Machine Interaction

Barcelona/Spain, October 23rd, 2024. Hosted by the EMVA, the seventh European Machine Vision Forum on November 7 – 8 in Mulhouse, France, once again brings together machine vision experts from academia and industry for mutual exchange in a unique setting. The on-site host this year is École Nationale Supérieure d’Ingénieurs Sud-Alsace (ENSISA) of the Université de Haute-Alsace.

This time the focal topic is “Challenges and Opportunities in Computer Vision for Human-Machine Interaction”. The Chair of the European Machine Vision Forum, Professor Michael Heizmann, explains the intention behind the choice of topic: “While machine vision often focuses on the automation of monitoring, control and inspection tasks without human intervention, this year’s focus is on integrating humans as part of an overall system. This is relevant in many application areas, e.g. for assembly tasks in industry, but also when driving vehicles or playing computer games. Some technical issues are relevant in all of these domains, such as the choice of suitable sensor technology, the selection and parameterization of image processing methods and dealing with the always variable appearance of people. Issues such as the consideration of personal rights also often play an important role. At the forum, such aspects will be addressed in presentations and poster contributions. In addition, current research results and new applications in the entire field of machine vision will be presented.”

The first keynote lecture of the event is titled “Optical Measurements: From the Laboratory to Industry” and will be given by Jean-Pierre Chambard, HOLO3 Research Centre, Saint-Louis, France. The afternoon session of the first conference day will be opened by the second keynote speaker Maria-Theresa Licka of MAIMY and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany talking about “Machine Vision Solutions on Mobile Devices – Scaling Human-Machine Interaction”.

In his keynote talk on the second day of the event Christian Daul, CRAN, University of Lorraine and CNRS, Nancy, France will talk about “Improving Endoscopic Data Acquisition and Interpretation using 2D and 3D Mosaicing Algorithms for Poor Image Content”.

In addition to that, more than a dozen top-notch presentations will be given by representatives from industry and academia highlighting various aspects of the focal topic “Challenges and Chances in Computer Vision for Human-Machine Interaction”.

For more information on the forum, visit www.european-forum-emva.org.

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.