The first Embedded Vision Europe conference (EVE) closed at the ICS International Congress Center Stuttgart on Friday with a fully booked attendance of about 200 participants. The event has brought top-notch speakers from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, The Math Works, Xilinx, and others to Stuttgart. They have shared with the audience their insights about latest developments in vision processing, image acquisition and deep learning. “Machine Vision is a 10+ billion Euro industry with annual growth rates north of 10 percent. Embedded Vision provides the hardware and software tools to boost this growth far beyond traditional growth rates and traditional expectations. This is happening right here and right now. Europe’s rich ecosystem of vision manufacturers, vision machine builders and vision solution providers and the new hardware and software platforms from the embedded world will be a perfect match. This is what we wanted to support with our conference by connecting people to people and people to knowledge. We are very happy to see that our idea has caught on with our target audience“, says Gabriele Jansen, Member of the Board of the EMVA which organized the conference.

Florian Niethammer, Team Leader VISION at Messe Stuttgart which hosted the first EVE added: "With around 200 attendees the debut of the Embedded Vision Europe was a full success. In this high-profile technical conference the latest developments in embedded vision were shown. We are especially proud that together with our partner EMVA we managed to provide this trend topic in imaging with the platform it deserves and to organize the first event of this kind on a European level here in Stuttgart."

Participants, speakers and exhibitors at the accompanying table-top exhibition were fully convinced about the new conference: "Computer vision will soon give the power of sight to all our electronic devices. This conference brought together key engineers and executives that are pushing the boundaries of this technology, making it a great place to understand important trends and how vision will be embedded into powerful new products,” said Marco Jacobs, VP Marketing at Videantis and one of the top-notch Speakers.

“This event has been an excellent initiative by the EMVA to provide a focus to discuss the advancement of embedded System-on-Chip technologies and how they may impact but also give opportunities in the machine vision industry. The speakers have been of a suitable high-caliber as I have come to expect from EMVA events and the topics presented have provided thought provoking material for networking discussions” says Colin Pearce, Managing Director at Active Silicon Ltd.

Paul Maria Zalewski, Product Line Manager at Allied Vision Technologies confirmed the overall impression pointing out the necessity of addressing embedded vision in such a conference format: “The change to Embedded Vision already started a couple of years ago and will speed up further every year. Overall, I believe that in the classic machine vision applications within factory automation, the process of shifting to embedded systems will take longer than in applications and markets which demand embedded systems from the very start because they are restricted in terms of price and size. On the other hand, if smart factory approaches will be further pushed by the industry, it can make PC-based systems less attractive faster than expected. Embedded Vision has the potential to divide our machine vision industry. Not all players might be able to adapt quickly enough and may find themselves back in niche markets, where PC-based systems will be still the dominant system in the future.”

With respect to the speed of development in the embedded vision market and the importance this topic gained in the machine vision sector plans are under way to establish the conference with an annual cycle.