VISION 2007 and its new venue reveal the perils and the glory of machine-vision exhibitions
VISION 2007, held in Stuttgart, Germany, 6–8 November 2007, will be remembered as the largest, most impressive machine-vision show in the world by most attendees. Certainly, the nearly 300 exhibitors, a record visitor turnout, and a brand new location were cause for celebration. But not by all those who attended the show. One man fell head first down one of the escalators that linked the two halls where exhibitors demonstrated the latest hardware and software products. Another performed a rather large incision on his leg while attempting to open one of the packages he had shipped to the show. He was hospitalized.
And then, of course, there was yours truly. After the first day of the show, pounding along the uncarpeted concrete of the show halls, my right leg decided it had had enough. Back at the hotel, my right knee became rather large, probably due to an injury sustained while running after a young lady outside a fish-and-chip shop in England when I was 18 years old. After a 3 a.m. (0300 h) visit to the local “Krankenhaus” to see Dr. Schnuck, I was prescribed Ibuprofin. The doctor also thought that a certain amount of “foot tapping” exercise might be beneficial. It wasn’t quite what I had expected after paying out €137.94.
Michael Moore, of Sicko fame, is no longer one of my favorite film directors. For the next two days, I was confined to a wheelchair where I discovered the benefits and short falls of being temporarily handicapped in a foreign country. These benefits included high-speed traversing of the trade show, the lack of a need for excuses for being tardy for appointments, and the large amount of sympathy heaped upon me by my associates in the machine-vision community.
Unfortunately, especially for those in wheelchairs, the handicapped bathrooms on all the floors of the “Neue Messe” were locked. As you can imagine, a 50-something journalist hobbling into a bathroom in Germany and performing “foot-tapping” exercises was out of the question.
Despite my condition, I did manage to visit a large number of companies that exhibited in the two vast halls that comprised VISION 2007. For those of you that could not attend, let me describe the show.
The first hall was replete with rather smaller booths and newer, less-established companies that exhibited some very interesting technologies and applications. Many of these you can read about in this issue.
In the larger hall, many established companies seemed to be playing a booth game of “mine is bigger than yours.” Some, with really nothing new to introduce, had purchased voluminous booths with which to impress the attendees. In fact, some of these booths were so large that one felt lost in a “booth canyon” trying to see any other companies exhibiting. According to a spokesperson for the Messe, this will change next year when the show is moved into another hall the size of five baseball fields.
On the last day of the show, after receiving a rather long lecture about caring for myself from my publisher, Kathy Bush, it was time to leave. To do so, the trusty chariot that I had ridden for two days needed to be returned to the organizers. Before securing my wheelchair, my boss, Conard Holton, had left his American driving license as a “deposit.” Unfortunately, upon returning the chair, he found that the organizers had assumed that since it had not been returned on the first day, it had been stolen. Luckily, other members of our organization speak German. Otherwise, it seems, my boss would have been imprisoned for theft. Although some of you may think that hospital or prison is the best place for editors of trade magazines such as this, my publisher, like Queen Victoria, was not amused.
Hopefully, next year VISION 2008 will feature lushly carpeted hallways, bathrooms that open, and less bureaucratic staff. Other than that, VISION 2007 can only be rated 10/10 by this reviewer.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
The Needs of the Many
Parallel-processor-based systems offer system developers a path to real-time, high-speed image capture and analysis--but only in certain applications As many a Star Trek fan will tell you, one of the most memorable quotes from Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn (1982) is uttered by Mr. Spock. When asked whether Captain Kirk should assume command, Spock replies that “logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” This same concept was obviously on the minds of developers of the World Community Grid (WCG; www.worldcommunitygrid.org), an organization intent on creating the largest public computing grid to benefit humanity.
The idea of the network is very simple. Researchers sign up with highly parallel computational tasks such x-ray crystallography and protein analysis. To perform this analysis requires large numbers of data sets to be analyzed, a procedure that can easily be accomplished on a distributed network of computers. Luckily, with more tahn 340,000 members and 840,000 processors networked online, the WCG is providing much of the computing power required.
But even with this number of distributed processors, the research tasks that need to be accomplished require an even larger number of computers. With this in mind, WCG developers are asking for donations—but not in the form of money. WCG wants to harness the power of your computer at home or at work to help speed this research. Basically, the idea is rather simple and resembles a peer-to-peer network.
To become a member of WCG, simply download a small program from the WCG Web site onto your computer. When your computer is idle, it requests data on a specific project from the WCG server. Your computer then performs computations on these data, sends the results back to the server, and asks the server for a new piece of work. Since each data set is only approximately 50 Mbytes, all of today’s PCs can easily handle the task.
The software also allows you to configure your system so that it can be set to perform these tasks during midnight hours or at weekends. To make this more interesting, you can set up your own “team”—get your friends and colleagues to join and accumulate “points” that, to be honest, are worth about as much as my frequent-flyer miles! So, instead of turning your computer in the office off when you leave for home you can leave it on knowing that you are contributing to invaluable research on cancer, climate change, and human proteome folding.
Avoiding gridlock
While many research projects such as these lend themselves naturally to parallel distributed processing, so do many machine-vision and image-processing tasks. In stereo image processing, for example, two processors can be used to simultaneously process image data from two independent cameras.
Indeed, in this issue, Homer Liu of QuantaView (Tokyo, Japan) describes how two Intel Xeon processors have been used for this very task (see “Vision-based robot plays ping-pong against human opponent,” p. xx). With the advent of dual- and quad-core processors, this trend is likely to continue as software vendors rework their code to take advantage of parallel-processing concepts.
To achieve the optimum performance for parallel-processor-based systems, however, developers will need to closely match the I/O, processing, and storage capabilities of such systems. Today’s Camera Link-based systems, for example, can be used to transfer data from a single camera to a host-based frame grabber at rates of up to 850 Mbytes/s using 85-MHz transceivers.
However, there is no single or multiprocessor von Neumann-based CPU commercially available that at present could possibly process individual images at this data rate, relegating such camera-based systems to high-speed image analysis where image data are captured and then later played back for image analysis. Because of this, it is likely that for the foreseeable future, heterogeneous networks of distributed computers may remain useful only for large-scale algorithmic research projects such as those currently running on the World Computing Grid.
The idea of the network is very simple. Researchers sign up with highly parallel computational tasks such x-ray crystallography and protein analysis. To perform this analysis requires large numbers of data sets to be analyzed, a procedure that can easily be accomplished on a distributed network of computers. Luckily, with more tahn 340,000 members and 840,000 processors networked online, the WCG is providing much of the computing power required.
But even with this number of distributed processors, the research tasks that need to be accomplished require an even larger number of computers. With this in mind, WCG developers are asking for donations—but not in the form of money. WCG wants to harness the power of your computer at home or at work to help speed this research. Basically, the idea is rather simple and resembles a peer-to-peer network.
To become a member of WCG, simply download a small program from the WCG Web site onto your computer. When your computer is idle, it requests data on a specific project from the WCG server. Your computer then performs computations on these data, sends the results back to the server, and asks the server for a new piece of work. Since each data set is only approximately 50 Mbytes, all of today’s PCs can easily handle the task.
The software also allows you to configure your system so that it can be set to perform these tasks during midnight hours or at weekends. To make this more interesting, you can set up your own “team”—get your friends and colleagues to join and accumulate “points” that, to be honest, are worth about as much as my frequent-flyer miles! So, instead of turning your computer in the office off when you leave for home you can leave it on knowing that you are contributing to invaluable research on cancer, climate change, and human proteome folding.
Avoiding gridlock
While many research projects such as these lend themselves naturally to parallel distributed processing, so do many machine-vision and image-processing tasks. In stereo image processing, for example, two processors can be used to simultaneously process image data from two independent cameras.
Indeed, in this issue, Homer Liu of QuantaView (Tokyo, Japan) describes how two Intel Xeon processors have been used for this very task (see “Vision-based robot plays ping-pong against human opponent,” p. xx). With the advent of dual- and quad-core processors, this trend is likely to continue as software vendors rework their code to take advantage of parallel-processing concepts.
To achieve the optimum performance for parallel-processor-based systems, however, developers will need to closely match the I/O, processing, and storage capabilities of such systems. Today’s Camera Link-based systems, for example, can be used to transfer data from a single camera to a host-based frame grabber at rates of up to 850 Mbytes/s using 85-MHz transceivers.
However, there is no single or multiprocessor von Neumann-based CPU commercially available that at present could possibly process individual images at this data rate, relegating such camera-based systems to high-speed image analysis where image data are captured and then later played back for image analysis. Because of this, it is likely that for the foreseeable future, heterogeneous networks of distributed computers may remain useful only for large-scale algorithmic research projects such as those currently running on the World Computing Grid.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Blue rinse group
Machine vision looks more like a bargain when it's viewed as another helping hand... It's always good to save money. And with this in mind, I decided that I would fly to October's Pack Expo show in Las Vegas, NV, using a “vacation package” from Southwest Airlines. For a cost of less than $600, the airline flew me from Manchester, NH, and back, booked me three nights in the Circus Circus hotel/casino/resort, and gave me complimentary passes to a day trip to the Hoover Dam. Upon boarding the aircraft, I discovered that “Blue Man Group” was playing at the Venetian Resort for a price of just $70. Along with the Hoover Dam trip, this was an event I would never attend.
Looking around the aircraft passengers, it appeared many of them were of the “blue rinse” group—people aged 65 and older who were on a similar low-cost trip destined for Las Vegas. Why anyone would want to go to a town reputed to have been founded by gangsters in the middle of the desert still amazes me, but I was later to find out. After interviewing several passengers on the aircraft and at the hotel I discovered the reason. It was very inexpensive. While some companies attending Pack Expo had booked their employees into $200/night hotels (some taking hundreds of their customers to Las Vegas entertainment), I was stuck in Circus Circus with the blue rinse group, where the average cost of a room is $60. On reflection, perhaps this was not one of my wisest decisions. After battling though a myriad of slot machines, I went to bed.
The next day, I decided to take a cab to Pack Expo. In more than five halls, most the size of two baseball fields, nearly every packaging company in North America displayed products and machines that produce, fill, label, wrap, and inspect bottles, paper packages, and plastic containers. With more than 2000 exhibitors and more than 20,000 attendees, the show was, like Las Vegas itself, over-the-top, outrageous, and extreme.
Although my trusty companion, Judy Leger, could not attend the trip, she had supplied me with a list of companies to visit. Without it, I would have been lost. In the space of three days, I managed to visit about 20 companies that incorporate or produce machine-vision products used in the packaging and production industries. Many of these systems can be found in this issue of Vision Systems Design. Traversing the show floor, I also had the opportunity to visit companies that simply had not embraced the concept of adding machine vision to their production equipment. While many produce machinery that manufactures, wraps, and fills specific products, very few—in fact fewer than 20—were exhibiting machines that provide any kind of inspection of the finished product. It all seemed rather odd.
On the last day of the show, I sat at our tiny booth contemplating the subject. I was then approached by an engineer who needed to perform web inspection of wrapped film traveling at 400 ft/min. He had been quoted a price by a system integrator of $20,000 for a system that could accomplish the task. He felt that the price was far too high. He wanted something for less than $15,000.
After I explained that the cost of linescan cameras, Camera Link frame grabbers, lighting, and software would probably be about $15,000, and nonrecurring engineering costs would be at least $15,000 for his application, he left our booth rather amazed. I could not help wondering, however, whether the bill for his trip to Pack Expo would be more than $2000. Perhaps those who need to expense machine-vision systems need a different model.
As Preben Hjornet, chief technology officer at InMoTx (Sacramento, CA, USA), suggested to me, “Engineering managers should perhaps regard any automated system, whether it uses a robot or other automated equipment, as an employee rather than a machine. That way, the machine would not be regarded as a capital expense.” Until that happens, however, many in the packaging industry will still regard machine vision as an expense they cannot afford.
Looking around the aircraft passengers, it appeared many of them were of the “blue rinse” group—people aged 65 and older who were on a similar low-cost trip destined for Las Vegas. Why anyone would want to go to a town reputed to have been founded by gangsters in the middle of the desert still amazes me, but I was later to find out. After interviewing several passengers on the aircraft and at the hotel I discovered the reason. It was very inexpensive. While some companies attending Pack Expo had booked their employees into $200/night hotels (some taking hundreds of their customers to Las Vegas entertainment), I was stuck in Circus Circus with the blue rinse group, where the average cost of a room is $60. On reflection, perhaps this was not one of my wisest decisions. After battling though a myriad of slot machines, I went to bed.
The next day, I decided to take a cab to Pack Expo. In more than five halls, most the size of two baseball fields, nearly every packaging company in North America displayed products and machines that produce, fill, label, wrap, and inspect bottles, paper packages, and plastic containers. With more than 2000 exhibitors and more than 20,000 attendees, the show was, like Las Vegas itself, over-the-top, outrageous, and extreme.
Although my trusty companion, Judy Leger, could not attend the trip, she had supplied me with a list of companies to visit. Without it, I would have been lost. In the space of three days, I managed to visit about 20 companies that incorporate or produce machine-vision products used in the packaging and production industries. Many of these systems can be found in this issue of Vision Systems Design. Traversing the show floor, I also had the opportunity to visit companies that simply had not embraced the concept of adding machine vision to their production equipment. While many produce machinery that manufactures, wraps, and fills specific products, very few—in fact fewer than 20—were exhibiting machines that provide any kind of inspection of the finished product. It all seemed rather odd.
On the last day of the show, I sat at our tiny booth contemplating the subject. I was then approached by an engineer who needed to perform web inspection of wrapped film traveling at 400 ft/min. He had been quoted a price by a system integrator of $20,000 for a system that could accomplish the task. He felt that the price was far too high. He wanted something for less than $15,000.
After I explained that the cost of linescan cameras, Camera Link frame grabbers, lighting, and software would probably be about $15,000, and nonrecurring engineering costs would be at least $15,000 for his application, he left our booth rather amazed. I could not help wondering, however, whether the bill for his trip to Pack Expo would be more than $2000. Perhaps those who need to expense machine-vision systems need a different model.
As Preben Hjornet, chief technology officer at InMoTx (Sacramento, CA, USA), suggested to me, “Engineering managers should perhaps regard any automated system, whether it uses a robot or other automated equipment, as an employee rather than a machine. That way, the machine would not be regarded as a capital expense.” Until that happens, however, many in the packaging industry will still regard machine vision as an expense they cannot afford.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Engineering in 2010
Every engineer likes block diagrams. Not only do they encapsulate the concept of a system design at a high level...Every engineer likes block diagrams. Not only do they encapsulate the concept of a system design at a high level, but they are easily understood and form the basis for the design of nearly every machine-vision system. Over the past ten years, the many authors that have contributed to Vision Systems Design have supplied these diagrams to allow you, the reader, to rapidly understand the hardware concepts behind system design.
But of course, these block diagrams can only tell part of the story of any design. The diagrams are, by their nature, static objects that only provide a conceptualized nature of any design. Engineering, on the other hand, is a dynamic process that involves interfacing numerous hardware components, overcoming timing issues, properly configuring software, perhaps on multiple processors, and then debugging the system to ensure correct operation.
In developing a machine-vision system, this task is more complex because of the nature of the parts that need to be inspected and the defects or parameters that need to be measured. What is, in fact, required is an integrated software-development environment that can be used to describe, simulate, test, and build a system in software alone.
While this may appear challenging, it will probably form the basis of all engineering design within the next ten years. Indeed, software developers are already blazing a path toward this goal with graphical development tools that allow the user to develop and test image-processing software before deployment. However, for the concept to become a reality, tests on individual parts will need to be simulated in CAD environments.
Electronic components such as cameras, lighting, frame grabbers, I/O controls, switches, and PLCs will need to be simulated as virtual objects within a graphical user interface. Timing and control data from the electrical CAD models of these products will need to be stored in databases. Host CPU operating systems and image-processing software will need to be modeled as objects that control this virtual environment.
At present, many of these ideas exist in isolation. CAD packages can be used to simulate the mechanical motion of systems. Electrical specifications for the components used may exist on data sheets. Machine-vision software must be developed on realtime or Windows-based computers in isolation from the hardware that will be used when the system is deployed.
Imagine, however, using an integrated graphical system environment to develop a machine-vision system. The supplier sends you a CAD model of an ideal part and CAD models of parts with defects. By using simulation software, a complete machine-vision system is developed as a mechanical abstraction in which lighting, illumination, and lens parameters can be controlled. These images are used as a model with which to develop machine-vision software. Simultaneously CAD and electrical models of the hardware are described in a CAD model.
At the highest level, the engineer can visualize the design as a block diagram. As he or she probes deeper into the design, the mechanical, electrical, and software models are revealed so they can be tailored for a specific application.
FROM STATIC TO DYNAMIC
This, in essence, transforms the static block diagram into a dynamic software model. Engineers that endorse this concept will reap the benefits in numerous ways. By sharing such “block diagrams” with other engineers, systems will be able to be developed more rapidly without having to re-invent the wheel every time a new system needs to be developed.
These concepts are already being explored by a number of companies worldwide. When realized, the simple block diagrams of the past, published electronically, will set a new standard for system design. When published electronically, such sophisticated diagrams will also benefit the less noble art of electronic trade publishing.
But of course, these block diagrams can only tell part of the story of any design. The diagrams are, by their nature, static objects that only provide a conceptualized nature of any design. Engineering, on the other hand, is a dynamic process that involves interfacing numerous hardware components, overcoming timing issues, properly configuring software, perhaps on multiple processors, and then debugging the system to ensure correct operation.
In developing a machine-vision system, this task is more complex because of the nature of the parts that need to be inspected and the defects or parameters that need to be measured. What is, in fact, required is an integrated software-development environment that can be used to describe, simulate, test, and build a system in software alone.
While this may appear challenging, it will probably form the basis of all engineering design within the next ten years. Indeed, software developers are already blazing a path toward this goal with graphical development tools that allow the user to develop and test image-processing software before deployment. However, for the concept to become a reality, tests on individual parts will need to be simulated in CAD environments.
Electronic components such as cameras, lighting, frame grabbers, I/O controls, switches, and PLCs will need to be simulated as virtual objects within a graphical user interface. Timing and control data from the electrical CAD models of these products will need to be stored in databases. Host CPU operating systems and image-processing software will need to be modeled as objects that control this virtual environment.
At present, many of these ideas exist in isolation. CAD packages can be used to simulate the mechanical motion of systems. Electrical specifications for the components used may exist on data sheets. Machine-vision software must be developed on realtime or Windows-based computers in isolation from the hardware that will be used when the system is deployed.
Imagine, however, using an integrated graphical system environment to develop a machine-vision system. The supplier sends you a CAD model of an ideal part and CAD models of parts with defects. By using simulation software, a complete machine-vision system is developed as a mechanical abstraction in which lighting, illumination, and lens parameters can be controlled. These images are used as a model with which to develop machine-vision software. Simultaneously CAD and electrical models of the hardware are described in a CAD model.
At the highest level, the engineer can visualize the design as a block diagram. As he or she probes deeper into the design, the mechanical, electrical, and software models are revealed so they can be tailored for a specific application.
FROM STATIC TO DYNAMIC
This, in essence, transforms the static block diagram into a dynamic software model. Engineers that endorse this concept will reap the benefits in numerous ways. By sharing such “block diagrams” with other engineers, systems will be able to be developed more rapidly without having to re-invent the wheel every time a new system needs to be developed.
These concepts are already being explored by a number of companies worldwide. When realized, the simple block diagrams of the past, published electronically, will set a new standard for system design. When published electronically, such sophisticated diagrams will also benefit the less noble art of electronic trade publishing.
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