The European Machine Vision Forum in Cork, Ireland, was hosted by the Tyndall Institute, which - similar to the German Fraunhofer Institutes - conducts application-oriented research. Peter O'Brian, professor at the Tyndall Institute, and speakers from some of the partner institutes provided participants with an insight into the Irish machine vision ecosystem, which includes academic and industrial activities. This included the presentation by Prof. Martin Glavin, University of Galway, who spoke about vision systems for driver assistance and autonomous driving. In addition to the technical remarks, his conclusion was that it will be decades before autonomous cars are on our roads across the board - simply because the systems are far from being ready for mass deployment.

Another highlight of the conference program was the keynote speech on terahertz light-field imaging by Professor Ullrich Pfeiffer from the University of Wuppertal. He spoke about the challenges in beam generation as well as beam acquisition and evaluation. He discussed new approaches to solutions that could also provide new impetus in the visible light spectrum.

Range of topics from light field inspection to multispectral imaging and machine learning

Also exciting was the presentation by Christian Kludt, Fraunhofer IOSB, on light field inspection. He presented a light field display and uses it as a highly tunable illumination device where the spatial and directional distribution of light beams can be programmatically adjusted. This can produce an object-specific light field that highlights the features of the object under inspection with maximum contrast. This means that the entire machine vision system can be made much simpler when it comes to capturing complex objects.

Other topics at the fifth European Machine Vision Forum included multi/hyperspectral image acquisition as well as real-time 3D data acquisition, components for image acquisition, but also energy efficiency as a growing requirement and hardware support for image processing algorithms. In addition, the list of topics also included the currently very heavily researched topic of machine learning with neural networks.

In addition, there was an exhibition of numerous companies with posters and smaller exhibits. Among the exhibitors were Midwest Optical Systems, Advantech and others.

The six European Machine Vision Forum will be held in Wageningen, the Netherlands, in cooperation with Wageningen University and Research. More details will follow soon.