Q+A CENTER

The other, Gimple adds, is 3D imaging, which he says is a gateway to many new application areas, including inspection and measurement of complex freeform objects.

Michael Noffz, Head of Marketing at Silicon Software (Mannheim, Germany), points to the growth of software for machine vision. “In the last decades, a broad base of methods and algorithms were developed for image processing software to solve most requirements in machine vision applications.” He says software vendors are working on the enhancement of inspection quality and the increase of processing performance.

“While CPU-based software started to improve the algorithmic quality, there is other imaging processing software based on processor technologies like GPU and FPGA,” he says. “These technologies start to take over parts of the traditional imaging processing.”

And, he adds, standardization, such as GenICam, is adding usability, by allowing a modular setup of machine vision systems to enable an easy exchange of components.

Kamalina Srikant, Vision Product Engineer for DAQ/Vision/Motion at National Instruments (Austin, Texas), sees three trends—improving algorithms, broadening hardware support, and making vision software easy to use. “Of the three trends, improvements in ease of use are the most prevalent and important. We usually associate ease of use with the time it takes to program an inspection. However, there also is a trend toward improving the ease of testing inspections for reliability and accuracy before they are deployed.”