MATRIX VISION celebrates 30th anniversary as industrial image processing company

Back in June of 1986, Gerhard Thullner and Werner Armingeon founded MATRIX VISION. Flash forward to today, and the company has nearly 100 employees and a wide portfolio of machine vision and imaging products.

In the beginning, the company developed software for atomic absorption spectrometers, as well as a graphic controller for large-screen Atari computers. Thullner and Armingeon presented the product at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover in 1989, but by the time PCs caught up with Atari, the team had already began moving in another direction.

"There were already established companies in the PC market, so it would have been too risky for us," said Thullner. From there, the company started developing frame grabbers for industrial applications, marking the company’s entrance into the still-young image processing sector. It was this move, according to MATRIX VISION, that opened up new business ventures of the company. Armingeon felt that the standard image processing solution, comprising a frame grabber, camera and PC, was too complex and unreliable, and the company began work on one of the first smart cameras on the market.

"Unfortunately this project had to take a back seat to other commitments for a while; otherwise we would have brought it to market much sooner," noted Armingeon.

The company began working on industrial cameras once interfaces such as USB and Ethernet had become established, and the products joined frame grabbers in the company’s standard product line in 2004. Today, the company makes more than 210 industrial cameras, including its mvBlueSIRIUS stereo optical system, which is able to capture dynamic objects, and recognize and analysz their size, position, and speed, as well as track the behavior in real time. Additionally, MATRIX VISION released the mvBlueGEMINI smart camera in 2016, which is a dual-core Cortex A-9-based smart camera that features an open system with user-defined tools that can be developed and parameterized as required.

Learn more about MATRIX VISION’s 30 years as a company by checking out an interactive timeline on it’s homepage.

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