Stuttgart redux

MICHAEL D. WHEELER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, MICHAEL.WHEELER@PHOTONICS.COM

By the time you read this, many of you will be making your way to VISION, the world’s largest machine vision trade fair, in Stuttgart, Germany. This year marks a bit of an anomaly — it’s the first time in the event’s history that it has been held in back-to-back years, a result of the disruption brought about by the pandemic. Organizers are projecting a 25% increase in the number of exhibitors over 2021, when travel restrictions and quarantine regulations prevented many visitors from the U.S. and Asia from attending.

A highlight of the fair is the presentation of the prestigious VISION Award, given to the company offering the most disruptive technology in machine vision. And if recent winners are any indication, the bar is high for this year’s finalists.

Consider last year’s winner, Prophesee, which wowed judges with its unique event-based sensing and software solution. In Prophesee’s sensor, each pixel intelligently activates itself depending on the contrast it detects. This enables high-speed, low-latency output with only a fraction of the raw data required by traditional sensors.

The 2018 winner, Photoneo, offered a similar ground-breaking submission. Its 3D-sensing technology incorporated parallel structured light technology, along with a proprietary CMOS image sensor, to capture high-resolution images of moving objects at an unprecedented rate.

Good luck to those who’ve been named to this year’s short list: brighter AI, Edge Impulse, Kitov.ai, Saccade Vision, and SWIR Vision Systems.

Inside this issue

The rise of e-commerce, IoT, and Industry 4.0 are all factors that have increased the need for robotics. To accommodate robot movement within a three-dimensional space, many solutions involve 3D imaging with active or passive illumination, such as time-of-flight and stereoscopic cameras. News editor Jake Saltzman’s “Vision Elevates Robot Performance in Logistics” offers insights into recent advancements.

Logistics is a theme in another of our features this month. See “3D Scanning Method Captures Fast-Moving Objects Without Motion Artifacts”, by Photoneo’s Andrea Pufflerova and Marcel Švec.

We round out the Autumn edition with Ed Goffin’s “AI as a Decision-SupportTool for Human Operators,”, and contributing editor Hank Hogan’s “More Processing Power for Today’s Smart Cameras,”. In Hogan’s article, he reviews notable innovations in smart cameras, including specialized GPUs and neural processing units that are bringing AI-based machine learning to edge IoT devices.

We hope you enjoy the issue!