In his opening remarks, conference chair Ben Dawson, director of vision research at Miros Inc.

In his opening remarks, conference chair Ben Dawson, director of vision research at Miros Inc. (Wellesley, MA), explained the conference goals of presenting new high-level views, ideas, and opportunities of visual intelligence, and previewed the conference topics and speakers. Bill Silver, chief technology officer of the Modular Vision Systems Division at Cognex Corp. (Natick, MA), compared the traditional nontemplate and template methods of object-inspection techniques with new geometric matching techniques. His results showed that geometric matching for object location and inspection avoids gray-level, pixel-grid representations, can locate and inspect objects by shape, tolerates severe shading variations, and can detect fine flaws at any angle and size.