Coinciding with the opening of the 28th edition of VISION, the world's leading trade fair for machine vision, the jury announces the winner of the VISION Award 2018 innovation competition. Worth 5,000 euros, the award for the most innovative development in the machine vision sector goes to Slovakian company, Photoneo for its PhoXi 3D camera.

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 visionary founders wrote history, turning the initial team of four into a successful company with around 80 employees and a wide worldwide network of distributors and certified integrators. Today, the product portfolio includes high quality hardware like the PhoXi 3D scanner family, PhoXi 3D camera and autonomous mobile robot, Phollower 100, not to mention various software applications for bin picking.

Market gap closed by 3D techniques

Explaining its decision in favour of Photoneo as 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. In her laudatory speech, 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: "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."