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 in 2024. The 7th European Machine Vision Forum will take place 7 – 8 November 2024 in Mulhouse, France.

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.’

Embedded Vision Europe Conference 2019 at ICS Stuttgart

• 133 attendees from 23 countries, 80 B2B networking meetings
• Conference highlights AI and Edge computing
• European players in good starting position

See also EMVA Press Release: Embedded Vision Europe Conference 2019 – Final Report

The 2^nd edition of Embedded Vision Europe conference (EVE) closed on Friday, 25^th October, at the ICS Stuttgart with a fully booked attendance of participants from 23 countries. The event has brought top-notch speakers from companies like Intel, NVIDIA, Micron, Pleora and others to Stuttgart.

Picture Gallery EVE 2019: Click here 

Embedded VISION Europe 2019 is the leading conference in Europe focusing exclusively on the areas of this disruptive technology and organized by the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), supported by Messe Stuttgart, the organizer and host of the biennial VISION international trade fair. Embedded VISION Europe is aimed at developers and users of embedded vision technologies from all industries. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition of technologically leading companies presenting their embedded vision competence with innovative products, applications and services.

The presentation program included the full spectrum of the embedded vision industry, covering topics such as new hardware compute platforms, embedded vision standards and APIs, specific approaches to optimizing neural networks, as well as real-world examples of the deployment of vision based embedded AI systems. It was framed by a highly frequented table-top exhibition. Cooperation and exchange between the attendees was supported by close to 80 individual booked B2B meetings between the attendees during the conference breaks.

EVE 2019 Presentation Program:

Dynamic area for innovation

EMVA Board of Directors member, Dr. Chris Yates moderated the conference and in his opening remarks stated that “Embedded vision is one of the most dynamic and creative areas for innovation in our industry”. He noted that the importance of embedded vision is demonstrated by the remarkable fact that there are almost certainly more embedded vision systems in use today than humans on the planet. “These systems are transforming our factories, hospitals, transport, and living spaces, by providing machines with greater cognitive ability through vision”, Yates said.

Computational Neural Networks are here to stay

In his closing remarks Dr. Chris Yates stated that AI and computational neural networks have become a dominant topic which will be here to stay. While technological limits have been driven further and further recently the current challenge would be to put a focus on ease of deployment and thus abstracting the complexity of the products that find their way into machine vision applications. For this, he pointed out; further cooperation amongst small and big players would be needed.

EMVA’s European Machine Vision Forum took place from September 4 – 6, 2019, in Lyon, France.

Being already the 4th edition of the EMVA addressing ‘Research meets Industry‘ the forum was held under the focal topic

Photonics and Machine Vision: Going Deep into Integration

Get more impressions and visit the EMVF-2019 Picture Gallery.

“Deep learning is not enough – overall system optimization is necessary.”

This headline summarizes the conclusion of the 4th European Machine Vision Forum, where research and industry met in Lyon from September 5 to 6, 2019.  In tune with the region around Lyon with Grenoble and St. Etienne, the main topic was the integration of photonics and machine vision: “Photonics and Machine Vision: Going Deep into Integration”.

The starting point for this main topic was a glimpse into nature. Over millions of years, biological vision systems have emerged which not only have a tremendous ability to learn, but have also evolved very different types of visual systems adapted to the task in terms of spatial resolution, spectral sensitivity, colour vision, motion perception and response time.

In the first keynote talk “The future of image sensing – More intelligence or more sensing?” Prof. Peter Seitz (Hamatsu Photonics, Soloturn) demonstrated how diverse information carries light, which can be made visible by suitable image sensor technology, but which cannot be detected by even the best learning methods without this option. The second presentation “Learning high-level reasoning in and from Images” by Prof. Christian Wolf, INSA, Lyon critically analysed the interpretation of machine learning. While until 2012 characteristics were determined empirically, the same will be done today with the structures of neural networks and tomorrow with the methodology of image processing. At the same time, he gave hands-on advice on how rewarding it is to integrate known contexts such as symmetries and invariances into the design of neural networks. The synthesis between photonics and machine vision was the central focus of the third keynote talk “The convergence of photonics and electronics: an opportunity for machine vision” by Dr. Francois Simoens, CEA-Leti Grenoble. He pointed out how the new technologies of photonics, sensor technology and electronics are merging and how the new opportunities of 3-D stacking of wafers enable complex vision systems with light sources, microoptics, sensor technology and electronics. As examples a complete LIDAR system on a chip with scanning laser light without mechanics (“Optical Phased Array”) was presented and a vision chip (“Smart Retina”) with integrated pre-processing.

The program featured a further 25 presentations and an accompanying exhibition. The participants honored the high quality of the presentations, the professional organization of the event and the numerous opportunities for exchanging ideas between research and industry. This encouraged both sides to take home fresh ideas for their projects. The fact that a European region was able to present itself at the “French Evening” also resulted in several new contacts at pan-European level.

Outlook on the 5th European Machine Vision Forum 2020

At the end of the event the 5th Forum was announced by the local Chair, Prof. Peter O’Brien. The forum will take place from 10-11 September 2020 at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland with the focus on “Accuracy, Reliability and Limits of Machine Vision”. An ideal topic for dialogue between research and industry. The research can find out where the theoretical limits exist and reveal to industry what the current state of technology is today. Both partners together thus have a solid basis for jointly initiating new projects for the development of novel, powerful and at the same time cost-effective systems in areas where there is a corresponding market need. Since image processing is a cross-sector technology, the limits can be manifold: What is the highest possible image resolution? What limits the sensitivity and sharpness of image acquisition? What are the limits of different processes for 3D image acquisition? To what extent can the image data stream be reduced in order to obtain the information of interest? (Compressive Sensing). How tiny can image processing systems become? How reliable can image processing systems be? How much can the delay between image acquisition and evaluation result be reduced? What is the minimum power required for certain image processing operations? …

The topic was inspired by the high accuracy requirements of components that integrate photonic elements (light sources, micro-optics, sensors) and electronic parts. The Tyndall National Institute is hosting the European Photonic Packaging Pilot Line.

Author

Prof. Dr. Bernd Jähne

Bernd Jähne has been Professor of Physics at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR) since 1994 and Senior Professor since October 2018.  In 1995, he founded the Heidelberg Image Processing Forum and from 2008 to 2017 was coordinating director of the Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing (HCI), an “Industry on Campus” project at the University of Heidelberg. Since 2008, he has been Chairman of the EMVA 1288 Standardization Committee and became member of the EMVA Board in 2015.