Resource-Rich Tradition
With search engines and web sites providing a multitude of options for finding components such as machine-vision cameras and lighting, a single, comprehensive resource such as this Buyers Guide faces tough competition. Yet it continues to prove its value—providing system integrators and end users with a centralized resource that serves as a guide to multiple machine-vision components, the vendors and representatives that manufacture and distribute them, and the integrators who develop systems for end-user applications.
This 2010 Buyers Guide lists more than 600 manufacturers of vision products, along with almost 300 vision system integrators and more than 100 manufacturers’ representatives. These companies are headquartered in 30 countries and sell more than 190 different categories of products.
The Guide contains three sections: a Product Guide, a Vendor Directory, and a System Integrator Directory. While the table of contents provides a general guide to these sections, the Product Index contains a detailed reference list of the product categories.
For continually updated coverage of new vision products, visit the Product Center on our web site: www.vision-systems.com. Here you will find a digital version of the Buyers Guide, our Industrial Camera Directory, a Product Showcase, and daily postings of new product announcements. You can also register to receive our e-newsletters, which highlight recently introduced machine-vision systems and components.
To illustrate how the machine-vision and image-processing components referenced in this Buyers Guide can be integrated into complete systems, we have included several articles about innovative system design and technologies. Three such system design articles describe how system integrators have developed machine- vision and image-processing systems for disparate applications including solar wafer inspection, robotic handling systems, and automated pork production.
Finally, two articles examine some of the fundamentals of machine vision. In the first, an interview with Daniel Lau at the University of Kentucky sheds light on some of the recent advances in the use of 3-D imaging, structured illumination, GPUs, multicore CPUs, and image-processing algorithms. The second article explains how the resolving power of imaging systems can be determined by using a variety of test targets.
Machine-vision systems and components such as those identified in this issue may also be found at important industry trade shows. As the economy recovers, a good place to see automation equipment, robotics, and machine vision in action will be at Automatica, which runs from June 8–11 in Munich. I hope to see you there, and look forward to your continued loyalty as a reader.
W. Conard Holton, Editor in Chief
[email protected]