Focal topic
Real-world Machine Vision Challenges –
Coping with Variability and Uncontrolled Environments

Barcelona, March 1^st, 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:

• Large varieties of disturbances (e.g., vibrations, motion in the scene, variable illumination, ambient light variations of the background)
• Variations of the objects to be inspected (high inter-class variability, e.g. for fruits), which may lead to insufficient training data for machine learning
• Unknown camera poses (e.g., for moving imaging platforms)

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:

• Schneider-Kreuznach Group => ‘Imaging Lenses in Logistics in focus‘
  This presentation discusses current technologies and highlights of imaging lenses for Logistics 4.0
• Allied Vision Technologies GmbH => ‘Vision solutions for Logistic vehicles and warehouse automation‘
  Person and pothole detection for safety for “Driver Assistant Systems and Functions” on Forklifts; object/ sign/ shelf sensing or load observation on AGVs and AMRs; pick and place applications on Robots.
• LUCID Vision Labs, Inc. => ‘Increase efficiency in logistics automation with the latest 3D Time-of-Flight cameras‘
  The presentation addresses how Time-of-Flight (ToF) can bring benefits to a vision system by reducing 3D application costs, increasing productivity, and making applications more efficient in the facility.
• LMI Technologies GmbH => ‘3D Smart Sensors for Packaging and Logistics Applications‘
  The presentation showcases how LMI’s Gocator 2490 laser profiler provides a fast and accurate method for 3D measurement of parcel dimensions.

‘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.

Michael Schmidt takes over from long-term serving Dr. Fritz Dierks    

Barcelona,​ December 19^th, 2022. During the last International Vision Standards Meeting (IVSM) in Tokyo/Japan the GenICam Working Group has elected Michael Schmidt as new Chair of the Standard Working Group. Michael Schmidt leads a camera development team at Basler AG. He takes over the position from Dr. Fritz Dierks who has been leading the GenICam working group for almost 18 years and chose not to stand for another reelection to initiate the process of rejuvenating the board of the GenICam standard working group. The GenICam standard is hosted by the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA).

“I would like to thank Fritz for his relentless work driving standardization in the machine vision industry throughout all these years. The impact of his strategic vision on the industry is a lasting contribution to standardization as one of the core pillars for the success of machine vision technology,” says Michael Schmidt.

Also, the EMVA Board of Directors thanks Dr. Dierks for his extraordinary and long-term engagement to serve the machine vision industry.

Unique interchange between research and industry continues 2023 in the Netherlands.

Barcelona,​ November 11^th, 2022. Organized by the European Machine Vision Association, the fifth European Machine Vision Forum end of October in Cork/Ireland once again brought together industry and academic machine vision experts in a unique setting.

Through the hosting Tyndall Institute, the European Machine Vision Forum became a door opener of its own kind for all attendees for a deep dive into the vivid Irish Vision Tech Ecosystem covering both academic and industrial activities. This included a broad spectrum of vision-tech activities ranging from driver assistance and autonomous driving to manufacturing and quality assurance of microelectronics; all in top-notch equipped research and production facilities.

One highlight of the conference agenda was the Keynote on Terahertz Light-Field Imaging given by Professor Ullrich Pfeiffer from the University of Wuppertal who discussed challenges in beam generation and sensing as well as evaluation and introduced new approaches to solve these encounters which could also give new impulse in the visible light spectrum. The broad spectrum of machine vision technology was further covered by presentations dealing with multi-/hyperspectral image acquisition as well as real-time 3D data acquisition; high quality components for image acquisition; but also energy efficiency as a growing requirement as well as hardware support for machine vision algorithms which was highlighted in the second Keynote presenting emerging photonic platforms for developing optical non-von Neumann computing devices. Furthermore, the list of topics also included the currently very heavily researched topic of machine learning with neuronal networks. Here it was shown how this promising approach can be brought together with proven concepts, e.g. from measurement technology and computer science.

The 6^th European Machine Vision Forum is already scheduled to take place 2023 in Wageningen/The Netherlands in cooperation with Wageningen University and Research. More details will be announced soon.

Social Media feedback post of a 2022 participant in Cork/Ireland:

“Enriching presentations on current vision topics coupled with insights into local Irish research, industry and (pub) culture – the 5th European Machine Vision Forum in Cork was definitely worth the trip! I am already looking forward to the next forum at Wageningen University.”

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.

Registration open for EMVA-Networking event on the eve of VISION 2022

Barcelona/Stuttgart, September 6th, 2022. The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) is pleased to invite to the 13th International Vision Night 2022 takes place on 03 October in the microbrewery of the Parkhotel Stuttgart Messe/Airport.

As the perfect attunement to the eagerly anticipated show days, the International Vision Night on the evening prior to the VISION 2022 opening offers the perfect mixture of networking and celebrating in a relaxed atmosphere. Since usually the international machine vision scene has already arrived in Stuttgart, this evening offers the perfect opportunity to meet and talk to business partners, colleagues and friends.

EMVA-members and non-members are cordially invited to join the relaxed get-together of machine vision experts from all over the world. More details on the event and how to register for the International Vision Night which is usually booked out rather soon can be found at www.vision-night-emva.org.

Oliver Scheel will drive networking internally and externally in the vision tech sector    

Barcelona, September 1st, 2022. The European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) today announced that Oliver Scheel has joined the EMVA team as Business Development Manager, effective September 1st. Central to his role at the EMVA will be the expansion of the exchange among industry participants, both inside and outside the association, as well as the dialogue with vision tech users, who will be increasingly involved in the association’s work in the future. The role will also support the continued growth and visibility of the EMVA as the leading European vision trade association.

“The EMVA has taken the time to identify the perfect match for this important new role of Business Development Manager. Oliver Scheel brings a wealth of experience in the industry and an enthusiastic approach to the growth of the association and ensuring we provide further benefits to our members. We are excited for the future and truly delighted to welcome Oliver to the EMVA team” says EMVA President Dr. Chris Yates.

“In my new position, I am very much looking forward to getting back in touch with the vision community and thus our EMVA members as well as potential new members. As such I am thrilled to meet the industry during VISION 2022 in Stuttgart at the latest” says Oliver Scheel. “The EMVA has set itself the goal of further expanding its leading role as an association and, together with the members, to think outside the box wherever necessary. This is both an exciting and motivating task for my future work.”

Oliver Scheel has long been familiar with the machine vision industry. He worked for 13 years as Commercial Manager EMEA for the publisher of the trade magazine “inspect – World of Vision”. He then spent three years as Sales Director for a well-known publishing house in Stuttgart. Most recently, he held the position of Marketing Director at a non-university research institution of the state of Baden-Württemberg, which conducts research projects in the field of artificial intelligence, among other things.

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

 Barcelona, Spain; May 5^th, 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