Q+A CENTER

The first quarter of 2009 is wrapping up, with all of us, of course, worried about the economy. It was Topic One for vision professionals at Photonics West in San Jose and the AIA Business Conference in San Diego, both of which we attended.

In a nutshell, the AIA's Paul Kellett told 175 attendees at the business conference on Coronado Island, look for short-term pain, but healthy sales growth long-term.

OK, let's take a break from the economy. The Automated Imaging Association presented Toshi Hori, a veteran of more than 30 years of leadership in the machine vision industry, with the 2009 AIA Achievement Award during its business conference.

Hori, president of GEViCAM, a GigE Vision camera company, was honored "for his accomplishments and for his outstanding contributions to the machine vision and imaging industry." How important are the leadership and innovation he provided? He invented an electronic shutter CCD camera for factory automation, progressive scan interline-transfer CCD cameras, the original Channel Link (now known as Camera Link) camera and neural network-based smart cameras.

Born and educated in Japan, Hori holds dozens of patents. He began his career in 1967 at Raytheon Semiconductor and its subsidiary in Japan as a semiconductor design engineer, marketing manager and, later, as general manager of the U.S. office. He has extensive technical expertise in superconductivity, solid-state physics, semiconductor design and fabrication, microwave sensors, and CCD/CMOS camera design.

In 1982 he founded PULNiX American, which was acquired by JAI in 2003. He served as PULNiX President/CEO and then CTO for JAI before founding GEViCAM.

Other presentations at the conference included:

• Machine vision opportunities in high-level surveillance
• Opportunities for machine vision in South America
• How image sensor technology changed camera function and performance
• The future of data connect standards (10 GigE, USB 3.0, IEEE 1394 and Camera Link)
• Strategies for growth in the global marketplace

Finally, the AIA announced that Mike Cyros of Allied Vision Technologies has been elected to a second year as board president.

On a separate note, if you haven't signed up for the first of our quarterly Webcasts on March 26, be sure to visit www.advancedimagingpro.com/webinars/illumination. The Webcast, the first of our Machine Vision Professional (MVP) series, will feature three industry-renowned panelists: William Biederman of Biederman Associates (Middlebury, Vt.); who has extensive experience in machine vision and illumination; Paul Tungseth, of Tungseth & Associates (Excelsior, Minn.) who has 20 years of experience in machine vision and imaging; and Perry C. West the founder and president of Automated Vision Systems, Inc., (San Jose) who has 30 years of machine vision experience (and is a previous winner of the AIA Achievement Award).

We all know how important illumination is to an application. Without good lighting, it's very difficult to obtain the proper information from your target. William, Paul and Perry will discuss numerous forms of lighting and explain which are best for a number of applications and which to stay away from. Please join us.