Lightfield camera headed for the consumer market

A recent article in the New York Times reveals that Lytro, a Mountain View, CA startup, plans to release a lightfield camera into the point-and-shoot consumer market later this year, allowing professional and amateur photographers to "take shots first and focus later."

With $50 million in venture funding, the company is led by Ren Ng, a Stanford University Ph.D. who wrote his thesis on the subject of lightfield cameras. His work and that of others are described in the March 2008 Vision Systems Design article Sharply Focused.

Several research organizations and machine vision camera manufacturers have developed lightfield cameras, including Stanford, MIT, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Raytrix, and Point Grey Research. Like traditional cameras, lightfield cameras gather light using a single lens. However, by placing an array of lens elements at the image plane, the structure of light impinging on different sub-regions of the lens aperture can be captured.

By capturing data from these multiple sub-regions, software-based image-processing techniques can be used to select image data from any sub-region within the aperture. In this way, images can be recreated that represent views of the object from different positions, recreating a stereo effect. Better still, if the scene depth is calculated from the raw image, each pixel can be refocused individually to give an image that is in focus everywhere.

An interactive photo from the Lytro website gives an idea of the potenial uses of lightfield cameras (hint: click on an area of the image to focus). And there will be a Facebook app.

Don Braggins remembered

Don Braggins, a long-standing and highly respected figure in the machine vision industry, has passed away at age 70. Founder of Machine Vision Systems Consultancy in Royston, England, in 1983, Don specialized in image processing and analysis and was a frequent contributor to and participant in organizations such as the European Machine Vision Association and the UK Industrial Vision Association (UKIVA). First as a founding member of the UKIVA in 1992, he became its director in 1995, and helped guide its development for many years. He remained a consultant to the association until diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 2010.

Traveling frequently with his wife Anne, Don was welcomed by companies, universities, and trade organizations around the world for his experience, insights, and good humor. Before establishing his own company, he was product marketing manager for image analysis products at Cambridge Instruments. A graduate of Clare College, Cambridge University, he was a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of SPIE.

Machine Vision Systems Consultancy was known for its independence as a source of information about machine vision products and services. Clients varied from multi-nationals, to startup companies, venture capitalists, and OEMs.

As editor of technical journals and frequent contributor to trade press magazines, Don regularly researched the European market for industrial vision systems for individual clients and associations. Between 2000 and 2002 he served as a non-executive board member of Fastcom Technology, a Swiss spinout from EPFL Lausanne. He was also a board member of Falcon Vision in Hungary, providing international marketing advice and technology sourcing, and introduced Falcon to the French company Edixia, which subsequently bought a controlling stake.

“Don knew the machine vision industry like the back of his hand,” remembers Andy Wilson, Editor of Vision Systems Design. “You could always rely on him to direct you towards the latest developments and innovations shown at a trade show. He was not only knowledgeable but would freely share his valuable opinions and thoughts with anyone who cared to ask. I will miss him.”

In addition to his wife Anne, Don is survived by two children and five grandchildren.

The staff of Vision Systems Design extend our sincerest condolences to the Braggins family.

--Conard Holton, Vision Systems Design

EMVA meeting--machine vision business good, missed the volcano

From May 12-14, more than 140 attendees at the 2011 EMVA business conference in Amsterdam celebrated the soaring market for machine vision products and recounted tales of traveling home from the 2010 meeting in Istanbul through the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano "Cloud". They didn't realize they would just miss yet another cloud from an Icelandic volcano, Grímsvötn, which erupted just seven days after the conference ended and disrupted air travel across parts of northern Europe.



Market health of European machine vision companies and companies doing business in Europe was reported to be excellent, with many focused on application areas that exhibit particular strength, especially automotive manufacturing, transportation imaging, and surveillance. From 2009 to 2010, overall growth by European companies was almost 35% (the drop from 2008 to 2009 had been -21% overall).

Germany expects to see overall growth of at least 11% in 2011, putting it back on a trend line consistent with pre-2009 sales, and about 20% growth was expected globally, according to the EMVA. Europe should see about 22% and the Americas about 19%. Asia, after a 62% year-over-year growth in 2010, should see a growth of 18% in 2011.

Describing the market trends, Gabriele Jansen, president of Jansen C.E.O. and Member of the EMVA Executive Board, attributed the strong rebound in machine vision sales to several factors:
- Increase in industrial production
- Broad-based improvement in sentiment among industry managers due to a significant increases in overall orders and in production trends
- Decline in the inventory of finished goods to historically low levels
- Remaining effects of stimulus programs for specific industries (eg, automotive)
- Strong increase in demand for machine vision in Asia

The conference mood was excited but a bit nervous, causing many to ask: How can this growth be sustained?

To inspire attendees to ponder answers to that question, the conference included several speakers who focused on the future, with talks about globalization and sustainablity, finding new markets using the Blue Ocean strategy, and how to think about and manage for the future.

Ramesh Rashkar, an MIT professor, described his lab's work in lightfield imaging and computional light transport, including recent work on a camera that can look around a corner. Speakers also address the rapid advances being made in service robots and machine vision for agriculture.

The networking, as always at EMVA events, was excellent. Talking with so many colleagues in the machine vision "industry" also reminded me that machine vision is not an industry per se. At its core, it is the integration of technologies and products that provide services or applications that benefit true industries such as automotive or consumer goods manufacturing, security, transportation, and agriculture.

Finally, a parting view of the Cloud that was missed: This Envisat image from ESA, acquired on 24 May 2011, shows a large cloud of ash northeast of Scotland that has been carried by winds from Iceland’s Grímsvötn volcano about 1000 km away. The Grímsvötn volcano, located in southeast Iceland about 200 km east of Reykjavik, began erupting on 21 May for the first time since 2004.

New iPhone App for 3-D imaging

It's not exactly machine vision yet, but a researcher at Georgia Tech, Grant Schindler, has created what appears to be the first 3-D scanner app for an iPhone 4.

Using both the screen and the front-facing camera, the app--called Trimensional--detects patterns of light reflected off a face to build a true 3-D model.

Schindler says Trimensional can now share movies and animated GIFs of your 3-D scans and users can unlock the 3-D Model Export feature to create physical copies of any scanned object on a 3-D printer, or import textured 3-D scans into popular 3-D graphics software.

I wonder if and when such iPhone apps can be used in machine vision applications?

Machine vision vs Angry Birds

Readers of Vision Systems Design may know that OptoFidelity (Tampere, Finland) makes systems that test user experience with products such as PDAs and mobile phones. In fact, our October 2009 cover story featured one of the company’s automated test systems, the WatchDog, which performed just such a test using a JAI Camera Link camera and National Instruments frame grabber. The WatchDog system’s interface allows a user to correlate an exact measured response of both the refresh rate of the screen and any user interaction with the device.

Now, OptoFidelity has expanded its world and made a commercial-quality video called “Man vs Robot” about a vision-guided robotic system it has built that can beat humans playing Angry Birds — which, in the unlikely case you haven’t heard, is a computer game from Rovio Mobile (Espoo, Finland) being played by millions of people on various mobile displays.

Some of the fun, machine vision, and robot technology behind that video appears in this “Making of Man vs Robot” video, also from OptoFidelity.

Vision guides Justin the Robot playing ball

This video explains it all. The DLR in Germany has developed Justin over the years as a very adaptable research robot, able to perform duties from acting as a butler to potentially working on a satellite.

The vision and motion capabilities shown by Justin in the video are remarkable. We will be covering more of such capabilities in the coming months based the recently completed research report: Vision for Service Robots, on sale on our website.

Machine vision industry consolidation - what's next?

Now that the recession is over and profits are rising fast, it seems that many companies are considering how to expand their markets and solidify both geographical and technological positions. The acquisition of LMI Technologies by Augusta Technologie, parent of Allied Vision Technologies, is just the most recent example of course.

Augusta also recently acquired P+S Technik (digital film expertise) and VDS Vosskühler (infrared specialist), and in 2009 acquired Prosilica (GigE cameras).

Teledyne has been reconfiguring the machine vision world with its recent acquisitions of DALSA (cameras, boards, software) and Nova Sensors (infrared), and the partial acquisition of Optech (airborne and space imaging).

And, in this year alone, Pro-Lite acquired light measurement supplier SphereOptics. Camera systems supplier NET New Electronic Technology acquired iv-tec, which develops algorithms and real-time image-processing software. And Adept acquired food-packaging equipment supplier InMoTx after having acquired service robot maker Mobility in 2010.

These are only the most recent and obvious acquisitions. Numerous OEMs and peripheral software and hardware makers have also merged or been acquired. It's a trend long predicted in the machine vision world. What hardware and software products will be in demand by those seeking to expand? What's next in the drive to create full-product-line vendors to serve vision system integrators and end-users?