Identifying trends and looking toward the future of vision

With the industry’s largest tradeshow—VISION 2016—taking place in Stuttgart from November 8-10, we thought we’d take a look back at the other (North American) vision show that was held earlier this year from May 3-5.

The show I’m referring to, of course, is The Vision Show 2016, which was held in Boston and put on by the AIA. Throughout the course of this show, I had the opportunity to discuss current trends and potential future developments in the industry with a number of leading companies from all over the globe. One question I asked everyone I met with was about current industry hot topics and potential growth areas, and while I received a number of different answers overall, some common threads began to take shape.

Hot industry topics and growth areas

"In which areas or applications do you see the most growth?" was the question I posed to everyone, in order to try to identify some trends.

Sebastien Dignard, President of FRAMOS Technologies Inc. suggested that areas of potential growth could include embedded vision, autonomous vehicles, and other forms of automation, he suggested.

"Vision is changing the world," he said. "The market and industry is still in its infancy. We’ve had great days, but better things are ahead."

He then commented on embedded vision in particular. "Vision is not just on the factory floor," he noted. "Embedded vision expands the market tenfold, and makes it easier to deploy vision."

Eric Ramsden, Director of Product Management at Lumenera, agreed with the notion that embedded vision represents a big market opportunity. He noted that embedded systems, such as those based on ARM-7 and Linux, are gaining popularity. He also commented that hyperspectral and multispectral imaging techniques are gaining traction, citing such applications as agricultural inspection.

"These technologies are enabling new applications," he said, citing a new product called the ColorFlow Lens and Software system from Stream Technologies, which is based on a combination of precision optics and thin film technology that spatially segregates light from a scene based on the spectral content and enables point-and-shoot hyperspectral imaging.

Jim Blasius, Solutions Architect for ADLINK Technology Inc., echoed a similar sentiment, noting that embedded vision is quite a hot topic for both his company—having recently released the EOS-1300 embedded vision systems—as well as the industry.

"We are selling embedded computing products to all markets," he said. "As Intel continues to increase performance, it allows people to deploy into more, smaller embedded applications."

Embedded vision was not the only topic mentioned as a hot or growing topic during my interviews, however. Paul Saunders, President, PixeLINK who did mention embedded vision, also told me that other applications that show promise include medical devices, biotech, biometrics, UAVs, and more.

"The drone marketplace is robust and will continue to be," he said. "We also like embedded systems, where there should be a lot of growth. There are so many possibilities within it."

He added, "USB 3.1 will also be big, as well as multi-camera applications," he said. "With these, come more throughput, which will make inspection applications much more sophisticated."

Vasant Desai, CEO (Germany), XIMEA, also talked about multi-camera environments, while also cutting UAVs and embedded vision.

"One camera, one wavelength is not enough," he said. "Multi-camera environments will be on the rise."

He added, "Need 4 (cameras)? Need 8? Whatever, XIMEA is addressing these needs providing extremely compact aggregation solutions streaming data coming from multiple cameras of various resolutions simultaneously through one optical cable."

John Phillips, Senior Manager, Product Management, Pleora Technologies, talked about his company joining the NBASE-T alliance, and how this fits in with possible growth areas for them.

"We see many Camera Link-based high-speed web inspection applications moving to NBASE-T."

Other areas he identified included medical imaging, such as high-speed X-ray, as well as GPU-based image processing," he said.

He added, "GPUs are incredibly powerful and the industry hasn’t explored these to the full potential," he said. "As GPUs get cheaper and easier to program, they will become easier to use. They are already prevalent in machine learning applications."

Dipesh Mukerji, VP Marketing & Strategy for KINGSTAR, told me that from his perspective, hyperspectral and multispectral imaging are potential growth areas.

"The global hyperspectral imaging market is expected to reach $74.29 million by 2019, with a growth rate of 12% from 2014 to 2019," he said. "With advances in sensors, filters, and processors, multi- and hyperspectral imaging is becoming more affordable, compact and accessible for a variety of applications."

He continued, "Government agencies and agricultural companies alike are deploying multispectral and hyperspectral imaging to measure crop health and growth. That could entail anything from identifying water-stressed plants to detecting diseased crops in the field."

Lastly, Jeff Burnstein, AIA President, suggested that warehousing and distribution could potentially have a significant impact on the industry, as the association heard a number of success stories at the Automate / ProMat show. He identified vision-guided collaborative robots—a topic that received its own area on the show floor this year—as the main technology that could be utilized in such applications.

Lastly, Founding Editor Andy Wilson noted that trends on the show floor could be summarized as those dealing with (a) interface standards (b) deep learning and (c) miniaturization. Read more about his thoughts here.

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