It's not easy being green

One of the benefits of being a journalist is that one occasionally is treated to very expensive meals by companies looking to gain some exposure. Such food tastes especially good since, as my father used to say, it doesn't taste of copper. Sometimes, however, meeting a number of companies in a single day means that the potential of a meal must be forfeited for the sake of a story.

This was the case last month when I visited Xcitex, a company that makes image-analysis software, in the pursuit of a feature on high-speed imaging. Luckily, the folks at Xcitex had placed a rather large bowl of chocolate mints in the foyer of their building and, while waiting for the interview, I decided to scoff a few to ward off hunger.

Being a rather nervous type, I unfolded the chocolates from their green wrapper and rolled the wrapper of each backwards and forwards between my hands. After our host emerged, I decided to question him on the demonstration of image analysis that was being projected from a rather expensive flat-panel display, also located in the foyer.

As the demonstration continued I nervously rubbed by neck in an attempt to concentrate more fully on the explanation. To capture the essence of the story I then proceeded to extract a pen from my suit pocket. In doing so, I noticed that both my hands had turned dark green.

As a fan of the Fox TV show "House," I immediately recalled an episode where Gregory House made an incorrect diagnosis and cut off a man's foot due to what he perceived was gangrene. I panicked.

Luckily, my host escorted me to the nearest washroom rather than operating theater. There, to my horror, I saw that my hands, my neck, and part of my face had turned dark green. After splashing copious amounts of water on myself I returned to the conference room where I was greeted with looks of bemusement.

The color of money
When the interview was over, I contemplated the effects of "being green" during the drive home. Although advances in solar and wind power will certainly benefit developers of machine-vision systems, all is not well on the green front. For example, the current worldwide initiative to reduce the use of potentially hazardous materials such as lead is driving the electronics industry to consider alternatives to the widely used tin-lead alloys found in plating.

The European Union already has enacted legislation known as the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directives to eliminate most uses of lead from their products. Promoted as easing manufacturing and compatible with existing assembly methods, pure tin plating is seen as an effective alternative.
So much so that many manufacturers have offered pure tin-plated components as standard commercial products. But most have never heard of "tin whiskers"--a metallurgical phenomenon involving the spontaneous growth of tiny hairs from a metallic surface such as ICs bonded to circuit boards.

This growth can cause catastrophic effects in mission-critical systems such as aircraft, satellites, and defense-related equipment. Indeed, the effect of tin whiskers has already been blamed for satellite failures such as the Galaxy IV. Anyone who wishes to visit NASA's Tin Whisker web site at http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker can see the detrimental effects of this phenomenon.

So, while you hear much written in the press about "going green" and the benefits of RoHS, remember there is always another side of the story. After your tightly bonded FPGA fails on your frame grabber within the next ten years, it may not be the fault of the board manufacturer but the processes that were mandated to make the world safer. While you might be enjoying the benefits of such green thoughts now, it may only rub off on you in the end.

The Magical Mystery Tour

Stuart Singer, vice president of Schneider Optics, is one of the most knowledgeable and passionate people you could ever meet. He knows light, optics, and lenses and can tell you exactly what you need to understand when choosing a lens for your machine-vision or image-processing application.

Unfortunately, that's where his talent ends.

Last year, at his company's Christmas party, Singer decided to practice his talents at magic. Rather than perform simple card tricks, Singer decided to impress his colleagues with a more sophisticated performance.

In his first attempt at magic, Singer revealed a "magic hat" from a trunk of props. Promising that his audience would be amazed at these cunning stunts, Singer poured a cupful of water into the hat, waved his magic wand, and placed the hat upon his head. Sadly, the capillary tubes within the hat failed to absorb this water, with the result that Mr. Singer drenched himself in water.

Not to be deterred, our indefatigable vice president moved on to his next trick, placing three eggs in the hat and beat them with his magic wand. But again, these eggs were not properly placed within the secret reinforced compartment inside the hat, a fact unrecognized by Singer. Placing the hat on his head resulted in our would-be magician being drenched in both water and
beaten eggs.

At this point, less determined folk may have quit and walked offstage in shame. But Stuart Singer is not a man to surrender easily. Instead, he proceeded to enlist a member of the audience in what would become his final trick -- thrusting a sword through the neck of the volunteer.

To perform this trick, as experienced magicians realize, a yoke to be placed over the head of the assistant is first shown to the audience. Passing the sword through an opening in the yoke gives the illusion that the sword will enter the subject's neck.

When the trick is performed, another opening in the yoke is used, so that the sword passes around the yoke bypassing the person's neck. Singer, feeling rather nervous about his first two dismal failures, did manage to show the audience how the sword would pass through the empty yoke and through the neck of the entrapped person.

After he heaved the yoke on the hapless audience member's neck, he thrust the sword through the yoke.

Unfortunately for the volunteer, Singer chose the wrong slot to insert the sword. Rather than pass around the yoke, the sword rammed into the subject, resulting in yelps of howling pain as the intrepid volunteer ran around, repeatedly screaming, "Take it out of my neck."

Worried hotel employees called the police as Singer packed his fat trunk and surreptitiously crept out of the back door. A "back door man" is not exactly the way a vice president wants to be remembered at a Christmas party.

Luckily, Singer does not perform magic tricks for his company at trade shows. Others that do, such as Edmund Optics, employ professional magicians to attract crowds. Thankfully for clients of Schneider Optics, Singer knows much more about lenses, lighting, and optics than magic. Indeed, in the March 2009 issue, he co-authored an article with Greg Hollows of Edmund Optics describing what you really need to know about choosing a machine-vision lens.

Unfortunately, some machine-vision component manufacturers still prefer to perform marketing tricks with their data sheets -- for example, describing lenses as "megapixel-compatible" without describing the measured features that show the performance of their products. Such measured features could include modulation transfer function curves, whether any alignment tools are provided, the lens performance at a given working distance, and how such lenses are used with specific image sensors. Only then will system integrators be provided a complete picture of the lens products they are purchasing.

Singer learned his lesson about "magic" last Christmas. Isn't it about time other manufacturers learned their lesson about magical marketing techniques?

Drive my car

I have always been a fan of Toyota Motor Corporation. So much so, in fact, that I am the proud owner of a Toyota Corolla, an outstanding motor vehicle that has presented me with very few problems since I purchased it nine years ago. My enthusiasm for the company's products, however, diminished considerably after a recent road trip to Canada.

After disembarking from a rather hairy ride on a twin prop Bombardier Dash 8, my trusty traveling companion and intrepid sales rep Judy Leger and I fought our way through a snowstorm to the counter of Budget Rent A Car System. There, to our dismay, we were offered two choices: a Chrysler PT Cruiser or a Toyota Yaris. I chose the Yaris.

It was not until the next day that we began to realize the limitations of this particular carriage. Having the car parked outside during a blizzard did not help matters. There was no means of turning the engine on remotely and, since the car was buried under an inch of ice and six inches of snow, a creative method of gaining access was required. This involved carrying copious amounts of hot water from my room in the Hilton Montreal Airport Hotel through the snowstorm and pouring it onto the Yaris's door lock.

After half an hour, I started the engine and waited another half an hour for the car to warm up. Finally, it was time to leave. Not being a fan of my particular type of driving, Judy took the wheel of the Yaris and we sledded off to our first appointment.

Being an automatic transmission, the particular Yaris we drove had five different lever positions for first gear, second gear, one marked "3-D", and those for reverse and parking. Driving along the highway, Judy put the car into the 3-D position and throttled the machine to 100 km/hr. After driving for ten minutes, we noticed that the tachometer was registering nearly 4000 rpm. It was all rather strange. Did the car have another overdrive gear? I read the manual. It did not.

Surely, I mused, the Toyota Motor Corporation could not have designed a car in such a manner. Perhaps, I dared to suggest, the "3-D" slot the gearstick was in should be moved over to the right hand position. I did not for a moment think that my traveling companion would take such a suggestion seriously.

But she did and, after moving the gearstick to the right "D" position, the tachometer registered a more reasonable 2500 rpm. I was flabbergasted. Unlike any other automatic car I have ever driven, the third and overdrive gears were located at opposite horizontal positions on the gear change.

In his December 2008 webcast, Robert Tait of the GE Global Research Center spoke of the need for design for manufacturing. Inthat webcast, which you can view at http://www.vision-systems.com/, Tait spoke of the need for machine-vision system integrators to understand the type of product being manufactured and how inspection tasks can improve the quality control process. To ensure that automobile parts can be easily inspected, he described CAD models that can help system developers visualize manufacturing systems.

Even better, by consulting with manufacturers before such products are designed, machine-vision system developers might suggest ways of ensuring that these parts can be more easily inspected, using tools such as barcodes, fluorescent dyes, and pre-engineered part location fiducials.

While CAD models can help designers of automotive products as well as machine-vision developers, they can also be used to simulate the experience of potential customers of the end-user product. In the case of the Yaris, for example, a properly engineered CAD model would have allowed a virtual customer to sit behind the wheel and drive a CAD model of the car as if he or she were present.

In such a way, automotive manufacturers could automatically test a virtual design before any vehicle design was completed or any car manufactured. Manufacturers such as Toyota Motor Corporation could thus attain immediate user feedback and design-out any confusing modes of operation that their customers might experience.

Roll your own

Personally, I have never rolled my own cigarettes. Being on a jet plane for half my life I am privy to the wonders of duty-free stores, where I spend my hard-earned pay on Dunhill International cigarettes. These fine English tobacco products are perfectly rolled, inexpensive, and meet the requirements of my not-so-sociable habit.

But there are others who do not have the luxury of purchasing these cigarettes at duty-free prices. In England, where cigarettes cost upwards of $100 per carton, the population is forced to "roll their own." Although this habit died out somewhat in the United States in the late 1970s, there are those in England who still perform the miraculous act of purchasing a packet of Woodbine tobacco and their own roll-up papers, and manufacturing their own unfiltered cigarettes.

A friend of mine in England swears that this process results in a much more satisfying smoke and one that costs far less than paying $10 for a pack of 20 Dunhills. Although the intentions of such addicts may be dubious, the potential cost savings are enormous.

After smuggling five cartons of Dunhill cigarettes through customs on my recent visit to VISION 2008 in Stuttgart for my wayward twin brother, I began to ponder the situation further. However, it was not until I visited the largest machine-vision and image-processing tradeshow in the world that I realized the potential of the "roll your own" phenomenon.

Rather than purchase fine ready-made camera products from a host of vendors, certain companies at Stuttgart seemed to thinkthat offering developers the potential to develop their own camera products -- albeit with a little help -- was a much better idea. Indeed, this year's Vision Award prize winner, Supercomputing Systems (Zurich, Switzerland; http://www.scsvision.ch/), proposed a model for its leanXcam intelligent color camera based on the concept of open source computing for intelligent cameras that would offer developers a means to develop their own camera systems for very little cost.

Supercomputing Systems, however, was not alone in the idea of "roll your own" cameras. At the Kamiera booth (Hod Hasaron, Israel; http://www.kamiera.com/), Yuval Nahum, vice president of sales and marketing, was also making a pitch for the concept. As a spin-off of GigaLinx, the company plans to offer what it calls Open-Cam, a business approach that allows customers to cut costs and increase flexibility by manufacturing cameras on their own rather than purchasing them off-the-shelf.

All this talk of lowering costs and offering manufacturers a way to develop their own specialized camera products certainlycaused a stir, especially among established camera vendors offering high-performance Camera Link cameras. A number of thesecommented on the validity of this business model and wondered how such companies could profit from these offerings.

Others, however -- most notably Kerry Van Iseghem of Imaging Solutions Group (Rochester, NY, USA; http://www.isgchips.com/) -- were less skeptical. Although the company doesn't offer business models such as those from Supercomputing Systems and Kamiera, the company does tailor its cameras for the needs of specialized applications.

According to Van Iseghem, the level of interest in tailoring cameras for specific industrial, medical, and military applications at VISION was very high, possibly endorsing the "roll your own" model. What may prove to be an initially successful business model, however, may or may not play out in the long term. Although the concept of open systems is good, one must question how companies that offer this type of product can compete in the long term, not just on price alone.

By endorsing such approaches, camera customers must then be forced to consider the availability of OEM components and product life cycles that may need to be supported for a number of years.

Although off-the-shelf cameras may seem more expensive and not completely tailored to a specific purpose, the "roll your own" approach may, although initially less expensive, prove a little riskier.

A bad case of the blues

After leaving my trusty Canon digital camera in the back of a cab while attending a tradeshow in Las Vegas, I was forced to purchase another. Upon visiting the local Best Buy with the name and model number of the camera that I had inadvertently mislaid, I was informed by the salesman that the camera I had previously purchased was no longer in production. My lost 6-Mpixel camera had been replaced by another, less expensive model, with a lot more features and an 8-Mpixel sensor.

Since I hoped my publishing company would pay for the camera, I decided to purchase said 8-Mpixel product and surprise them with the savings I had made. After using the camera to take numerous images of my son's recent graduation, however, I developed a bad case of the blues. Actually, it was a bad case of the lack of blues. Specifically, the blue response of the sensor was not comparable to that of the previous camera. Luckily for consumers like me, such effects can be compensated by some digital trickery embedded in Adobe Photoshop.

While some planned obsolescence by camera manufacturers may be good for the consumer, for system integrators, theseeffects on industrial cameras, frame grabbers, lighting, and other types of automation products can be much more serious. Imagine, for example, you have developed a machine-vision system designed to examine the color of potato chips and then automatically sort them as either good or bad. From the numerous types of camera vendors, you choose an RGB camera with a simple FireWire interface, interface it to a PC, and write some code to perform the color analysis. Based on this analysis, the PC then initiates a PLC and a remote actuator to sort the chips.

After a year of the machine working perfectly, vibration effects cause the camera to break, requiring a replacement. To yourhorror, you find that the upgraded, lower-cost replacement you install rejects every chip as bad. Needless to say, capturing each image and adjusting it manually in Adobe Photoshop is simply out of the question!

After hours of frustration and wasted production, it's time to call the camera company, where you are informed that it reallyisn't their fault at all. Rather, the blame lies with the CCD vendor that has upgraded its CCD line, making obsolete the original CCD and thus the camera vendor's original camera line.

To shift everyone's share of the blame, the camera vendor suggests that you remap your color space model to compensate for the new RGB spectral curves of the camera and everything should work as before. Not knowing anything about what software you originally used in the application, however, this is all the advice that you receive. What then follows can then only be mitigated by copious amounts of Vicodin and hair pulling.

Unfortunately, this sad state of affairs is not simply the problem of camera vendors. Similar problems can also occur when lenses, lighting, frame grabbers, CPUs, and software need to be replaced. Worse, when smaller manufacturers go out of business, their product lines are often no longer available, making any comparable replacement parts more difficult to find.

Often, I have heard stories from system integrators who have been tasked to replace complete machine-vision systems because many of the components and software of older installed systems can no longer be upgraded. In the mechanical automation industry, mechanical engineers can often replace parts such as CPUs, PLCs, and pneumatic actuators with a number of comparable parts from a host of well-known suppliers. Adding machine vision to such systems, however, is often fraught with danger since machine-vision standards and standard-compatible products still need to be developed.

Perhaps the only solution to this problem will lie in the development of a number of plug-compatible smart cameras from numerous vendors. With integrated optics, sensors, software, and I/O, products like these may become as commonplace as the PLC and just as easy to interface and replace.

Will history repeat itself?

Years ago, our publishing company produced a magazine entitled Computer Graphics World. Its premise was rather simple. Editors wrote about a number of different graphics components -- display controllers, monitors, software -- that were used in a number of different markets ranging from architectural and mechanical CAD to 3-D graphics rendering for motion pictures and desktop publishing.

Back then, there were lots of companies that produced different hardware and software. Because of this, there were numerous display controller manufacturers and monitor vendors that were only too willing to spend their advertising dollars to support the magazine.

One thing happened, however, that caused both the downfall of a number of companies in this industry and eventually the magazine. Although part of this was due to market consolidation, technology itself played a larger role.

Years ago, only fixed-frequency monitors were available and to get them to synchronize with a specific horizontal and vertical frequency, a specialized display controller was needed. To meet this demand, companies developed display controllers that supported other companies’ frequency-specific monitors.

In the 1990s, with the development of multisync monitors and multisync circuitry on the PC motherboard, nearly every monitor manufactured could be supported without the need of a specialized display controller. What happed after that is history.

Today, only gamers purchase graphics boards, while many industrial systems simply drive their displays from the PC. The graphics “market” is primarily a software industry replete with companies making games and architectural, mechanical, and electrical CAD and animation packages. While all of these packages together represent a large total market, the industries they serve are radically different.

Like the computer graphics market of the late 1980s, the machine-vision market is still evolving. It will only take time before a combination of technological innovation and consolidation reduces the number of companies that currently participate. For this to happen, a technological change will first need to occur.

At present, thousands of cameras and hundreds of frame grabbers exist that use interfaces such as Camera Link, GigE, USB, and FireWire. Because only two or three of these standards are currently supported on most motherboards, system developers need to purchase specialized frame grabbers to support many of the others. To process images as they are captured from digital cameras, many of these boards incorporate FPGAs that allow image processing functions to be processed in a pipelined fashion before the images are stored in the host PC memory.

Now imagine, however, a high-speed interface that can support a range of different camera clocks, one that is fully deterministic like Camera Link, features all the benefits of PC-based software such as FireWire, and one that is incorporated onto the system’s motherboard. Couple this innovation with the power of multicore CPUs and a graphics processor on the motherboard and the need for multiple cameras supporting different camera interfaces and frame grabbers with on-board processing capability will rapidly diminish.

While the jury remains undecided on what the type of camera interface will be, one thing is for certain. When it is finally developed and accepted, it will herald the demise of a number of smaller companies currently offering both camera and frame grabber products. While this will provide a boon for system developers whose time to integrate machine-vision systems will rapidly diminish, it will also provide an opportunity for vendors of machine-vision software.

Rather than support multiple camera standards, drivers, and frame grabbers, they will be able to concentrate more fully on developing higher-level machine-vision algorithms that run rapidly on multicore hosts. History will repeat itself -- the only question is when. If the computer graphics industry is any benchmark, such advances are at least a decade away.

Talking about my generation

Talking about my generation

Innovations in machine-vision hardware and software may best be found in unexpected sources and partnerships

On a recent trip to England I was fortunate enough to stay with my brother Dave and his son Paul, who is studying how to program FPGAs at the University of Bristol. As usual, I needed to know about all the books, courses, software programming tools, and development tools he was using in the pursuit of his degree.

During the course of the conversation, Paul mentioned that "on the side" he had coded-up a video game "for a laugh." As I had performed the same task over 30 years earlier (albeit on an Apple Macintosh II), I was intrigued. The game, it transpired, was a first-level rendition of the popular 30-year-old "Space Invaders" game.

While the idea certainly wasn’t original, the way Paul had coded the game certainly was. In fact, he demonstrated to me "his" version running on a mobile phone. It was a marriage of technologies that surely could not fail to win him many fans (and make lots of money). Unfortunately, being 20 years old, Paul had no idea how to go about licensing, marketing, or selling his idea to the likes of Apple, Nokia, or Motorola.

On my return to the United States, I pondered his conundrum and discovered that this was not a phenomenon faced only by the English. During several Web searches, I discovered a piece of code written by Bradley Ward to generate pseudo 3-D images using a webcam. Those of you interested can view a video of the software running at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdeymMz_8HA.

Being intrigued, I e-mailed Bradley and asked him how he planned to offer the code. To my horror, the reply was rather simple. It seems that Bradley will supply the code to "anyone interested." Once again, no licensing, marketing, or sales plan seemed to be in place.

They have an idea

As if things couldn't get much worse, my recent trip to NI Week drove the final nail into this coffin. At National Instruments' own booth, Benjamin Cook, an undergraduate student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and part-time NI intern, had developed an FPGA-based software package that emulated a number of different guitar pedal effects such as distortion, ring modulation, and tremolo effects. With the massive sales of Activision's Guitar Hero on my mind, I asked him if he had thought about plans to embed these effects into such products. He had not, although he was amenable to discussing any ideas with those who approached him.

With so many talented young people and so many good ideas, it is a mighty shame that there is no online brokerage to offer such ideas to manufacturers. So how are poor starving students supposed to make money from their efforts? Some companies involved in machine vision have an idea. Last year, for example, Aqsense, using ideas originally developed at the University of Girona, developed an improved method of determining the center point of reflected laser Gaussian profiles that is more accurate than center-of-gravity-based methods (see "Reading the Shapes," Vision Systems Design, March 2008.).

To market, promote, and sell this concept, the company did not embark on a large-scale marketing, advertising, and public relations campaign. Rather, the software was licensed to other camera and software companies with prior experience in structured lighting and machine vision. By tying together with such companies as Photonfocus and Stemmer Imaging, the company can concentrate on product development while at the same time offering its products to many companies worldwide.

At the November VISION 2008 show in Stuttgart, many of these third-party companies will be demonstrating their products with Aqsense software. Other small companies with a good hardware or software product would do well to follow the example set by Aqsense. By leveraging an installed base of products, software and hardware developers--students included--can add value to existing systems while at the same time making money and funding future machine-vision research. Tapping into the next generation of researchers and students will provide a great boon for the machine-vision industry.