Q+A CENTER

Industrial VISION Days

This program, long a fixture at VISION, features 45 talks by industry experts on the latest trends and developments and state-of-the-art applications in machine vision. In 2006, more than 2,600 participants attended the talks. Sponsored by the VDMA Machine Vision Group, it provides training and education opportunities to augment the exhibitions.

Another popular event is the VISION AWARD, the "prize for applied machine vision," which is entering its 15th year. The award honors innovative products and processes that are submitted by attendees and exhibitors at the show. A jury of machine vision experts will judge the entries and choose the winner. The judges are Roland Beyer (DaimlerChrysler AG), Don Braggins (Machine Vision System Consultancy), Holger Hofmann (ISRA VISION AG), and Martin Wäny (Awaiba Lda.). The winner will receive a cash prize of €5,000.

Last year's winner was Silicon Software (Mannheim, Germany) for its graphic tool ViusalApplets. Aimed at application engineers, the beauty of this product is that it has a simple graphic user interface with which FPGA (field programmable gate array) processors can be programmed and changed without specific hardware knowledge.

Other Highlights

The machine vision industry is expanding worldwide. One study showed that the global market for machine vision systems was worth $8.1 billion in 2006 and will grow to about $9 billion this year and as much as $15 billion in 2012. Here are just a few of the new products that will help this advancement:

Leutron Vision (Konstanz, Germany) will debut its PicSight cameras with Power over CameraLink (PoCL). The power supply for the camera no longer is provided by a separate cable or power pack, but directly by the MiniCL data cable. The CameraLink committee of the American Automated Imaging Association (AIA) recently extended the CameraLink standard to include PoCL.