Bag drop-off made easier with vision

There's nothing our European Editor likes more each year than taking a couple of weeks or more away from the hustle and bustle of work to spend his time loafing around in France's sunshine playground and enjoying fine wine and delicious food.

The trouble is, he does not much care for the journey to get there, nor the journey back. The UK airports are crowded affairs, you see, and boarding a plane often entails waiting in very long lines before one can obtain a boarding pass and check in one's bags.

However, thanks to a rather innovative system developed by Netherlands-based BagDrop (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), our European Editor's personal issues at the airport might finally be a thing of the past.

The new BagDrop systems looks set to make it easier for passengers to check in for a flight, obtain a boarding pass, as well as drop off their luggage, all without the need for any involvement from airport personnel.

Using the system, a passenger is first identified through the use of a scanner that can read passports and barcodes from flight confirmation documents e-mailed by airlines, after which flight details are verified. The passenger is then issued with a boarding pass and a barcode label that must be affixed to his or her bag.

In the next step, the bag is deposited into the BagDrop unit, which then checks the barcode to determine whether it was the same one that was printed for the passenger. In addition to calculating the volume of the bag using a 3-D imaging system, the system also measures a number of other parameters, including the bag weight, dimensions, and shape to determine whether or not it can be conveyed by the system. For liability reasons, it also captures an image of the exterior of the bag.

Once the bag has been accepted by the system, it then prints a claim tag that passengers can use to verify the identity of the bag upon arrival at their final destination.

The BagDrop system is already up and running at Schiphol Airport where it has already processed thousands of passengers. Unfortunately, our European Editor hasn't seen any of the systems at Heathrow airport yet, so he's still going to have to wait in a long line to take his next holiday flight to France. That's if I allow him to take any holiday this year.

A European look at 3-D imaging

Interest in 3-D imaging has never been greater. Everyone, it seems, is interested in knowing what applications this technology might help solve.

So when I heard that the good folks at Stemmer Imaging (Tongham, UK) were putting on an entire day's worth of seminars on the subject at Mercedes-Benz World in Weybridge (located in Surrey, England), I instructed our European correspondent to scream down there in his old Honda Civic to check things out.

Now you might think that folks who develop systems to inspect paper towels, examine the surfaces of women's skin, or scrutinize the tread on skis wouldn't have much in common. But our assiduous European editor discovered differently at the event.

That's right. At one particular seminar presented by Christian Benderoth, the sales manager of GFMesstechnik (Berlin, Germany), he discovered that manufacturers of all these products are using a rather nifty little handheld 3-D image scanner to inspect the surfaces of their products.

The product in question -- which has been developed by GFMesstechnik -- is called the MikroCADlite. It is, in essence, a small scanner that uses a digital light projector (DLP) from Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX, USA) to project a structured light pattern onto a surface. The images are captured by an imager in the scanner, then analyzed to reveal the details of surfaces.

According to Benderoth, folks that make kitchen rolls embossed with aesthetically pleasing structures have used the scanner to produce color-coded height images of the embossed paper, in a move that allows them to check the consistency of the pattern. Their counterparts in the cosmetics business have created maps of the surface of skin around women's eyes to ascertain the before and after effects of cosmetics such as anti-aging cream. Not to be left out, engineers developing skis are using the system to capture 3-D images from which they can produce plots of the variation in tread across the bottom of a ski.

After the presentation, our European Editor decided to see what literature he could pick up on the MikroCADlite system to take home and read during what little leisure time he has left after he's finished working on the Vision System Design magazine and web site.

While flipping through the page of the document back home, he discovered that the MikroCADlite system had also been put to use examining the decor of the interior of car parts too. More specifically, at the back of the document there was a comparison between the decor of a 2005 BMW and a Honda Civic not entirely dissimilar to his own (see image).

Now, of course, the sorry old fool is trying desperately to interpret the images to discover whether his UK-made Honda car has a superior interior finish to its German counterpart. It's the last time I send him anywhere.

Smart cards and 3-D imaging

Traveling to Europe can be an exhilarating experience. The chance to make contact with the Old World and its customs can be both delightful and enchanting. But it can also be frustrating, especially for visitors from the United States.

My visit to VISION 2011 in Stuttgart was no exception. Stopping off to catch up with my brother in the UK after the show, I discovered that the many (petrol) gas stations in the country were unable to accept my credit cards at the pump due to the fact that they had not been enabled with a so-called "chip and PIN."

That's right. In the UK, at least, it's common for credit and debit cards to come equipped with an embedded microprocessor which is interrogated by any number of automated terminals to provide goods and services once the user has entered a Personal Identification Number (PIN) that is uniquely associated with the card.

As frustrated as I was by the inability of the gas pumps to accept my chip-less card, my brother Dave saw the beasts as just a small step toward a completely automated future -- one in which vision systems could play an important role.

You see, having spent the past three days trawling around the VISION 2011 show, he had come across many companies that were developing 3-D vision systems. And while some of these were to be used in rather specific bin-picking applications or in capturing images of traffic on German highways, others could be used to capture images of the human body.

Capturing such images, Dave said, could create an enormous market far bigger than the field of machine vision -- especially if such 3-D images of the body could then be made small enough that they could be downloaded onto the memory of a credit-card-sized device.

Imagine, he inferred, if a complete image of an individual's body were to be encapsulated in such a way. Gone would be the need to wander around a store to search for an item of clothing that fits. Upon entering the store, a computer system would simply interrogate a user's card to identify an individual by his size and highlight where appropriate clothes could be found.

Medical professionals could benefit too. Upon entering a doctor's surgery, the current image of an individual's body could be immediately compared to a past image contained on the individual's credit card, providing doctors with an instant indication of any dramatic charges to body size that might indicate any medical problems.

Dave believes that there's enormous potential for such technology. But as much as he believes that such devices might make our lives so much easier in the future, I only wish I had one of those existing European chip and PIN cards today so that I might have been able to top up the tank at the gas station.