News In brief


Allied Vision has launched a fundraising campaign to help prevent and cure blindness and eye diseases in developing countries, as part of the company’s 25th anniversary celebration.


Framos has announced co- operation with Hitachi to distribute Hitachi’s range of chassis cameras.


Headwall Photonics has delivered two high-performance hyperspectral imaging sensors to Columbia University as part of its Air-Sea- Ice Physics and Biogeochemistry Experiment (ASIPBEX). This project will investigate climatological changes in the Arctic Ocean.


The Jenoptik Group has bought 92 per cent of Vysionics, a UK supplier of road safety and automatic number plate recognition technology, for an undisclosed sum.


Stemmer Imaging has become a member of the UK-government funded Manufacturing Technology Centre. The company will supply equipment and professional services for MTC’s Vision Laboratory.


OptoGroup, located in Gräfelfing, Germany, has acquired a majority shareholding in the company Alliance Vision, a provider of machine vision components.


News from EMVA By Thomas Lübkemeier


Vision 2014, the main event this autumn, has brought record numbers regarding visitors and exhibitors. Having organised the International Machine Vision Standards booth once again, we can confirm the overall satisfaction about the show. Copies of the Global Machine Vision Interface Standards Brochure were hugely popular and the hourly tutorials about vision standards as well as our two networking happy hour events were extremely well received.


Much has been achieved through the year also in the field of standardisation. A new release for the EMVA hosted GenICam standard


is imminent, and a sneak preview into the new 3D extension was exhibited at the show. In addition, the international Future Standards Forum has pushed standardisation in lighting during the show days: five working groups have been established that cover performance metrics of LED lighting as well as laser lighting, standardisation of light connectors, lighting command and control, and the photo-biological safety for LEDs and lasers. As to our networking activities,


members and non-members alike honoured the two main events in 2014 with their presence; the EMVA Business Conference held in Vienna,


10 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • December 2014/January 2015


and the International Vision Night on the eve of the Vision show opening in Stuttgart. The EMVA is happy to have welcomed several new members in the course of the year coming from different countries in Europe and abroad.


Regarding market data, the most recent market report, which, for the first time, maps the machine vision markets in Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, has been offered successfully to the industry. This report format will continue in 2015: the countries to be targeted next will be decided and announced soon. Moreover, the quarterly EMVA market survey on European vision sales is


continuously gaining acceptance and participants benefit from the accumulated numbers reported. Looking forward to the upcoming


year, without the Vision show the main event in 2015 for the European machine vision community will clearly be the EMVA Business Conference, taking place from 11 to 13 June 2015 in Athens. Registration is already open at www.emva.org and we would be happy to meet you in Greece.


On behalf of the whole EMVA team and all Board members, I wish all Imaging and Machine Vision Europe readers a peaceful holiday and a successful start to 2015!


@imveurope www.imveurope.com


Small-sats to represent strong market for space imaging


Cheaper, smaller satellites, so called small-sats, will become more common in the future for Earth observation (EO), and this is a market the UK space industry has the expertise to take advantage of, according to Mick Johnson, director of the Centre for EO Instrumentation and Space Technology (CEOI-ST). Speaking to Imaging and Machine Vision


Europe, he said: ‘One of the solutions [to getting good EO coverage] is that if you can make the satellites much cheaper, then you could have lots of satellites in a constellation. ‘Tere is a trend towards


that and the UK is very good at making small satellites at low cost – and quite sophisticated small satellites.’ Sales for the imaging sector of UK company,


Showcase event on 13 November in London, UK, highlighting various remote sensing technologies and showing a number of CEOI- ST projects. Imaging resolutions of the larger satellites


are currently around one metre, while the next generation of imagers have 30cm resolution or better, noted Johnson. However, a satellite typically only orbits


The UK is very good at making small satellites at low cost


e2v, were up six per cent at £37.4 million for the first half of its 2014 financial year, largely due to growth in space imaging and in industrial vision in Asia. Revenue for the entire company was £102.3 million for the first half of the year. Image sensors from e2v were onboard the


Philae robotic probe, which landed on the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November. Te CEOI-ST held a Space Technology


the Earth once every 100 minutes, and then, depending on the orbit, it might be a week before it gets back to the same location. Tis is one of the reasons for building smaller, cheaper satellites, because it allows larger numbers of them to be used to increase the imaging coverage.


Between 2,000 and 2,750 nano- and micro-


satellites are predicted to be launched from 2014 to 2020, according to data presented by Chris Brunskill from the Satellite Applications Catapult at Photonex, which took place in Coventry, UK from 15 to 16 October. Skybox Imaging, which Google bought for $500 million in June, and Planet Labs are two commercial small-sats currently in orbit. Both offer optical and near infrared spectral bands for imaging.


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