Thursday, July 3, 2008

Growing the industry

I’ve mentioned before that if we want to accelerate the adoption of machine vision the biggest issue to be addressed is ease of use. We have to get to a point where a vision system is as easy to set up and use as a consumer-grade digital camera. Products like the Checker are moving in that direction, but vision remains complicated and tends to lack industrial robustness.

One of the loudest voices arguing that ease-of-use should be development priority number one is that of Declan O’Dea of Cognex. In the April/May ’08 edition of “
Imaging and machine vision” Declan states, “… vision needs to be a 30-minute install from box open to ‘production ready’.” (Click here to read the whole Q&A article: Cognex vision.)

I second that motion. We don’t need more sophisticated image processing tools; we need greater intelligence embedded in our vision systems. Trust me, ease of use will be rewarded with tremendous revenue growth.

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