VISION 2018 | Looking Firmly Ahead

from VISION 2018 Review | MVPro 12 | Dec '18 / Jan '19

MVPro Magazine editor Neil Martin takes inthe latest machine vision fest in southernGermany and likes what he sees.

The VISION show, the machine vision industry’s bash which takes place every two years near the charming City of Stuttgart, rarely disappoints and this year’s event was a cracker.

STATS AND BACKGROUND

The traditional first day press conference saw an upbeat statement from the organisers Messe Stuttgart, declaring that VISION 2018 is “...bigger, more international, more dynamic...” and is “... the leading world trade fair for machine vision.”

As predicted, the event broke a number of records with some 11,106 professionals visiting the event in Stuttgart, an increase of 14% compared to the previous event.

This is a new visitor record and the proportion of visitors who came to VISION Stuttgart from abroad rose to a record 47%

Dr Klaus-Henning Noffz (above), CEO of Silicon Software and President of the VDMA Machine Vision sector group, said: “VISION is the world’s leading trade fair in the sector and was the pulse for machine vision for three days. In particular, the quality of the discussions and the great visitor interest in concrete solutions are impressive.

“Machine vision technology has long since established itself as the ‘eye’ and data supplier for Industry 4.0 and countless non-industrial application areas. The innovative strength and dynamism of the industry are promising, so we are already excited to see what VISION 2020 has in store from 10 to 12 November.”

Other figures which were released revealed more about the show.

For example, 472 exhibitors from 31 countries presented their products and services in Stuttgart. The corresponding figure in 2016 was 440.

The proportion of international exhibitors has also now risen by 3% to 60%, with the most widely represented countries being the USA with 44 exhibitors and the People’s Republic of China with 35 exhibitors. The amount of occupied net exhibition space was the highest ever at over 12,000 square metres.

“We are delighted that our target of 450 exhibitors has been surpassed,” said Florian Niethammer, VISION Project Manager. “This result clearly reflects the positive development of the machine vision industry.“ He added that in addition to the trend towards more internationalisation, the large number of new exhibitors (25%) is also an indication of the current dynamism in the machine vision industry. “This fits in with our motto this year, i.e. BE VISIONARY“, said Niethammer. “An appeal through which we want to encourage exhibitors and visitors alike to continue thinking and acting in future in a brave, visionary and revolutionary way.“

New application areas

The VDMA Machine Vision sector group, the promotional supporter of VISION, also regarded the development of the machine vision industry as a success story and is expecting stable turnover in 2018.

Dr Noffz again: “Despite all the challenges, the mood in the industry is positive and the growth trend will generally continue. Machine vision is well-established in production and is continually conquering new application areas, also outside the factory environment – permanently in use for improved quality, greater reliability and more security. Embedded vision in combination with deep learning will stimulate further growth.

“Turnover in the German machine vision industry has doubled in the last ten years. Between 2013 and 2017, the industry experienced average annual growth of 13 per cent. Last year alone, the growth rate was almost 18 per cent.“

VDMA also said that the future potential of machine vision lies not only in the worldwide trend towards automation, but also in the

capture of new sales markets and application areas outside the factory environment.

The organisation said: “This development can already be felt. The VDMA Machine Vision sector group stated, for example, that the share of turnover of the German machine vision industry in nonindustrial sectors was already 26% in 2017 while turnover itself rose by 16%. The growth drivers are regarded as the segments of security and surveillance, intelligent traffic systems, and medical diagnostic apparatus and operation equipment.”

New players and trends

Much was made of a number of trends which have been emerging from the industry.

An example of which was Deep Learning solution provider Adaptive. According to General Manager Michał Czardybon, Deep Learning technology is about to make a huge impact in the machine vision industry.

Much was made of a number of trends which have been emerging from the industry.

Hyperspectral Imaging was another trend at the show

Tapio Kallonen, CEO of Specim in Finland, explained: “Until now, the problem in applying Hyperspectral Imaging has been than it can only give a raw data output which doesn’t give a solution to any industrial player yet. The goal of Specim is to make Hyperspectral Imaging easy. We want to remove the barriers and need of special expertise required to apply Hyperspectral Imaging in an industrial environment. Our history is in remote sensing and environmental monitoring with that expertise in the last years we invested heavily in the industrial use of robust cameras.”

He said that their hyperspectral solutions already give added value for clients in the food, waste and recycling industries by improving accuracy and liability in detection of defects and parts. He also regarded VISION 2018 as a success for Specim: “We’ve had many interesting visitors at our stand here at VISION 2018. A lot of them came with their samples in their pocket. That was very exciting as we were able to directly check how Hyperspectral Imaging can help them through testing right at our booth. This alone was justification enough to be here in Stuttgart.”

Also making an impact was first-time exhibitor Inspekto. Harel Boren, CEO of Inspekto, said: ‘‘VISION 2018 has been a revelation. Inspekto launched the world’s first ever Autonomous Machine Vision product at the show and the reception has been incredible. Our stand was inundated by interested customers for our Plug and Inspect product Inspekto S70.

“The historic approach, using an integrator to go through the lengthy and complex selection of cameras, lenses, lighting and software can take months – our system can be installed in 30 minutes.

This affordability and immediacy means that QA managers can install the product at several points on their production line, avoiding unnecessary scrap and making savings on their bottom line. We call this Total QA and it has been hugely popular at VISION 2018’

More on Inspekto at the end of this feature

Michael Engel, Managing Director of Vision Components, touched on the embedded concept: “For us at Vision Components, VISION as the industry highlight is the ideal opportunity to meet our customers and partners and present our new developments. More than 20 years ago, we were one of the first exhibitors to offer smart cameras at VISION. We have consistently continued this ‘embedded’ concept and this year presented our brand-new MIPI camera modules.

“As someone who has been with VISION since its beginnings, I am overwhelmed by this year’s numbers of exhibitors and visitors. They show that machine vision has long since developed from a niche technology to an established and powerful sector. I was once again delighted to be an exhibitor at VISION 2018 and a member of the VISION Award jury”.

Award

The VISION Award 2018 for innovation went to Slovakian company Photoneo for its PhoXi 3D camera.

Worth €5,000, the award is for the most innovative development in the machine vision sector. The highest resolution and most accurate 3D camera in the world, according to the company, is based on the Parallel Structured Light Technology patented by Photoneo, which is implemented by a proprietary CMOS image sensor. For the first time, the technology lets users capture high resolution images of moving objects at a maximum speed of 40 metres per second. Thanks to more efficient deep coding technology with real pixel measurement, the camera achieves ten times higher resolution and precision than competitor technologies.

The start-up Photoneo was founded in 2013 with the idea of revolutionising 3D vision technology. Within a few years, the initial team of four became a successful company with around 80 employees and a wide worldwide network of distributors and certified integrators. Today, the product

**Photoneo wins the VISION Award 2018 with its PhoXi® 3D Camera, which achieves maximum resolution and precision with a completely new technology approach. (Copyright: Messe Stuttgart)**

portfolio includes high quality hardware like the PhoXi 3D scanner family, PhoXi 3D camera and autonomous mobile robot, Phollower 100, and various software applications for bin picking.

Explaining its decision to make Photoneo the winner of the award, the VISION Award jury cited the company’s high technological standards and the outstanding innovation of its submission, which reveals a completely new approach to the 3D acquisition of moving objects.

Gabriele Jansen, Managing Director of the M&A consulting firm, Vision Ventures and member of the VISION Award jury, also emphasized the high relevance of the PhoXi 3D camera for machine vision. She said: “The market potential for 3D applications in machine vision is huge. A whole portfolio of different 3D technologies is available for mastering the many different tasks. One technology, however, we have painfully missed so far: the high accuracy snap-shot area scan of large work areas in motion. Now Photoneo has closed the gap and is presenting the market with the Phoxi 3D Camera, a unique product to date.”

Inspekto

With a billing that they will change the industry forever, this press conference had a lot to live up to.

And in the end, after a sluggish start, it did. Whether Inspeckto have got it right, remains to be seen, but it’s proposition is compelling.

At the show it launched the S70, the world’s first Autonomous Machine Vision system. The S70, said Inspekto, offers powerful quality assurance capabilities in a small, versatile and practical package. Suitable for any handling method, product type and material, the S70 is up to the job, no matter what the visual QA task.

The S70 system can be installed in 30 to 60 minutes, 1,000 times quicker than a traditional machine vision solution and at ten per cent of the cost. This out-of-the-box system offers a simple, intuitive user interface designed to be installed directly by the shop-floor employee. This means that no systems integrator is required at any step of the short set up process, and at any time later. The S70’s high affordability and ease of deployment enable manufacturing plants to install it at any point on a production line, and even move it from one line to another, at any time in the future, within minutes.

A German company with Israeli DNA, Inspekto is supported by leading industrial businesses from across the DACH region. During beta stage, the company installed its system in the plants of leading industrial manufacturers, in countries including Germany, Italy, France and Austria. The S70 will deliver market changing benefits to manufacturers with a yearly total available market exceeding $30bn.

Harel Boren

“The S70 is a world first - defining the Autonomous Machine Vision category and introducing the inaugural Plug and InspectTM technology for the modern shop floor environment,” explained Harel Boren, CEO and co-Founder of Inspekto. “Because of the S70’s affordability and simplicity, the digital factory is now a reality, allowing collection of data, down to product-images, meta-data and defects from the entire production process and across production tiers. It offers full archiving and traceability - protecting both the manufacturer’s production process, as well as its customers, from unwanted scrap and unwanted defects.”

Zohar Kantor

“The market has been waiting for the arrival of the S70,” added Zohar Kantor, VP Sales of Inspekto. “Manufacturers are trapped into expensive contracts with systems integrators and cannot access machine vision technology themselves. Inspekto’s S70 system finally puts the manufacturer at the center-stage. Our powerful, and growing numbers of world-leading customers attest to the huge impact of the S70 in

responding immediately to any QA need arising on the production line. There is no need for any external experts, there’s no need to select cameras, lenses or any other equipment required with a traditional solution, there’s no need to take products off-line for inspection and there’s no need to put any special structures in place. By setting their visual QA systems, directly by themselves, the S70 gives manufacturers independent control on their QA, first time ever.”

Yonatan Hyatt

“Our team of research experts have pushed the boundaries of computer-vision and artificialintelligence technologies to develop a product that will change the QA industry forever,” added Yonatan Hyatt, CTO and Co-founder of Inspekto. “Working alongside some of the world-leading manufacturers across the DACH region, we have developed an autonomous product introducing an innovative and patented technology that dramatically increases the productivity of production and QA managers. It truly meets the challenges of today’s manufacturing world.”

Inspekto is working with a handful of leading German investors, including such top players as Mahle, Grazia, Steinbeis and ZFHN, and numerous leading DACH, French and Italian top global manufacturers, to revolutionize QA in manufacturing.

Inspekto’s Plug & Inspect technology means that employees in the manufacturing facility can take the Autonomous Machine Vision system out of the box and install it in minutes, on their own, without any help from a systems integrator and without the long process associated with setting up QA solutions today. Plug & Inspect powered systems provide full autonomy to the manufacturing plant: systems immediately self-adapt to any changes in the inspected object environment, such as changes in light conditions and object location or orientation, without any intervention whatsoever.

The system’s powerful machine vision and artificial intelligence capabilities mean that manufacturers can also independently change the object being inspected and the QA system, or even move the system to

another production line altogether, on their own, in minutes, with no need for any external experts.

“Traditional QA methods rely on systems’ integrators to install and adjust the QA system,” explained Harel Boren, CEO of Inspekto. “This imposes a tedious expert-dependant setup and commissioning process and ties manufacturers to a third-party installer, leading to inescapable excessive costs and downtime. Autonomous Machine Vision changes this. It makes the systems’ integrator entirely obsolete and brings control in-house, giving manufacturers the opportunity to plug and inspect in minutes. We put Inspekto on course to change machine vision QA from the necessary evil it is, to be customercentric, and give QA managers a tool that is 100 times quicker to set up, at 1/10th the cost.

“VISION is the best place for us to hold the ‘world premier’ of the industry’s first ever Autonomous Machine Vision system, powered by our Plug & Inspect technology,” Boren continued. “We will be running live systems on exhibition grounds so that manufacturers can experience first-hand how the new category of Autonomous Machine Vision systems will transform the way they perform QA.”

The robust technology behind Inspekto’s product, leading to unprecedented affordability and immediacy of installation, finally makes Total QA possible for any industrial plant, whereby inspection is conducted at every stage along a production line and is no longer limited to mission-critical points or the end of the line.

Total QA allows quality defects to be identified earlier than with traditional QA methods, which reduces the amount of resources wasted on the

manufacturing of objects with quality defects and carries vast direct impact to industrialists’ bottom line.

Harel Boren, CEO of Inspekto, the founder of Autonomous Machine Vision, explains the truth behind some common machine vision misconceptions.

“The introduction of the USB drive led to the eventual decline of the floppy disk, which is now banished to the history books of storage. As the machine vision industry goes on to embrace Autonomous Machine Vision, misconceptions remain.

‘Cost limits what’s possible’

“Installing a machine vision solution is viewed as an expensive process. This is because traditional machine vision solutions require a major effort and continuous investment on top of upfront costs. Installing and maintaining a traditional solution is a complex process that requires expertise. The combined cost of these professional services with cameras, lenses, lighting and more, turn traditional solutions into an expensive business - in the region of €20,000 to €150,000 or more, per inspection point.

“Because these solutions are tailored to a particular point in the production line, they are also inflexible, made to work for only one product at one point on one production line. This means adding additional quality assurance points to the line can cause costs to spiral.

“None of this is true with Autonomous Machine Vision, where a system is standalone, simple and quick to setup - making it affordable. In fact, an Autonomous Machine Vision system should typically

be installed at 1/10th of the cost and at up to 1,000 times the speed of planning and installing a traditional solution. Thanks to speed and affordability, it can be installed at any stage of the production line - and moved to a new location in minutes when required.”

‘A systems integrator is essential’

“Because traditional machine vision is a complex process, there is a misconception that the industry will always rely on the expertise of a systems integrator. The machine vision ecosystem has for many years aligned itself to the systems integrator, the only party equipped with the expertise needed to build a solution. Once the solution is installed, a systems integrator is required for every set up and changeover on the production line.

“In the age of Autonomous Machine Vision, systems integrators are no longer required. The manufacturer can install a visual quality assurance system out of the box in minutes. Because Autonomous Machine Vision systems can self-set and self-adjust, the manufacturer is able to do this independently at any point on the production line. Just like the floppy disk, the systems integrator becomes obsolete.

‘Machine vision will never be plug and play’

“Since the 1980s, manufacturers have used machine vision technology for quality assurance. The process has always involved building a tailored solution, piecing together the right filters, lenses, lighting and cameras. Over weeks or even months, the integrator must continue setting proof of concepts (POC), testing plans, programming and more - leaving plug and play visual QA as a far-fetched dream. As written by Fred Grootentraast from ICT Group in a 2016

article titled Machine vision is not plug and play, “The success of machine vision is dependent on the use of the right hardware and software and this requires specialised knowledge of both disciplines.”

“Though this was once true, Autonomous Machine Vision now brings the capability to simply Plug and Inspect. New technology, such as Inspekto’s S70 system, mean that in 30 minutes, any member of staff could install a system and start performing effective visual QA.

“Just as the next step in storage was not a smaller floppy disk, but an entirely new approach, Autonomous Machine Vision is a new era in visual QA.”

Investment

Leading multinational industrial companies from Germany and Switzerland have invested more than $10m into Inspekto. The start-up aims to meet the needs of a yearly multi-billion-dollar market across a broad range of vertical manufacturing sectors, including automotive and electronics.

The $10m injected comes from leading industrial players, as well as expert financial investors. Inspekto’s investors include: Grazia Equity, ZFHN, Mahle, Planven, THI Investments and Steinbeis. The company’s valuation post investment is in the region of $60m.

The funding is for Inspekto’s launch activities of Plug & Inspect technology driving its leading product, the INSPEKTO S70. During research and development (R&D), Inspekto collaborated with tens of leading DACH manufacturers to

ensure the product is perfectly aligned with market needs and requirements. The company is now heading to its official launch at VISION 2018 in Stuttgart, where it will hold live product demonstrations and make its product available for general sale to manufacturing plants worldwide.

“The INSPEKTO S70 is the world’s first ever Autonomous Machine Vision product, which will reinvent machine vision QA,” explained Harel Boren, CEO of Inspekto. “Leading players chose to invest in Inspekto because of its huge expected impact on industry,” added Boren. “This financial support offers a vote of confidence in the expected impact of Autonomous Machine Vision on the quality assurance (QA) industry - a multi-billion-dollar market. Inspekto’s mission is to make quality assurance managers love their jobs, by giving them complete control of where, when and how visual QA can be conducted.”

“Inspekto’s research team aspires to explore and push the boundaries of computer-vision and artificialintelligence to allow autonomous machine-vision solutions for industrial manufacturers,” added Yonatan Hyatt, CTO of Inspekto. “Our introduction of zerofriction setup of inspection units throughout entire

production lines is bringing factories to peak levels of efficiency and ensuring immediate detection of defects right as they appear in the manufacturing process. The current financing will allow us to further deepen our domain-specific research, alleviating major points of pain in the industrial domain.”

“As one of the largest automotive suppliers worldwide, we identified early-on the enormous potential impact of Autonomous Machine Vision on production, performance and competitive edge,” said Johannes Diem, Corporate Planning, Corporate Strategy, Venture Capital and M&A Strategy at MAHLE International GmbH. “Inspekto’s work with our plants has been consistently useful and led us to make our first-ever direct investment in a start-up company.”

“Steinbeis has a long history of working closely with German industrial manufacturers,” explained Uwe Haug, Member of the Board of Directors of Steinbeis GmbH & Co KG für Technologietransfer. “We identified early on the strategic impact that Inspekto brings to German industry, across any vertical and vendor size, which is what drove us to make our investment in the company.”

On the booth there was a live demo with an UR3e robot, demonstrating an industrial application scenario with HALCON 18.11. The robot arm reached into a collection of objects and was able to locate the position of the relevant object, thanks to HALCON’s matching technologies. The arm precisely removed the object from the crate, recognizing it by means of innovative deep learning functions, and then sorted it.

Embedded systems for industrial solutions