News In brief


Basler has hired Mark Williams as the company’s sales and business development manager for the UK.


Euresys has appointed Saber1 Technologies and Motion Analysis as its North American distributors.


Integro Technologies, a vision integrator, has partnered with Schott-Moritex North America to develop products for industrial machine vision.


ISVI has signed a distribution agreement with Rauscher to address the German, Swiss and Austrian machine vision markets.


Mikrotron has appointed Sedatec from Moscow and Precision Technic Nordic from Stockholm as distributors of its high-speed cameras in Russia and Sweden respectively.


Point Grey has hired its 200th employee, marking an important milestone in the company’s growth.


Thermal imaging car maps energy loss from homes


An MIT spin-out, Essess, is helping combat energy waste from homes by providing cars with thermal-imaging rooſtop rigs that create heat maps of buildings as they drive by. Te cars can image thousands of homes and buildings per hour, detecting fixable leaks in windows, doors, walls, and foundations to help owners curb energy loss. About the size of a large backpack, Essess’


rig includes several longwave infrared radiometric cameras and near infrared cameras. Tese cameras capture heat signatures, while a lidar system captures 3D images to discern building facades from the physical environment. An onboard control system has soſtware to track the route and manage the cameras. On the soſtware side,


to make fixes, so they know where to direct energy-efficiency spending. Tis may include sending customers the thermal images of their homes along with information on the fixes that could offer the most return on investment. But the start-up also works with the US


The start-up has since mapped more than four million homes and buildings


computer vision and machine-learning algorithms stitch together the images, extract features, and filter out background objects. In one night, the cars can generate more than three terabytes of data, which is downloaded to an onboard system and processed at the start- up’s Boston headquarters. Combining those heat maps with novel


analytics, Essess shows utilities companies which households leak the most energy and, among those, which owners are most likely


Department of Defence to help identify energy-wasting buildings on their bases. And schools, municipalities, oil refineries, and other organisations have hired Essess to scan their facilities and find, for instance, fixes that might affect their heating bills in the winter, have a short payback period, or are within a certain budget. ‘We’ve made thermal imaging


very automated on a very large scale,’ said Essess co-founder Sanjay Sarma. Founded in 2011, the start-up


has since mapped more than four million homes and buildings in cities across the United States for military, commercial, and research purposes. Te company developed an algorithm called


Kinetic Super Resolution – co-invented with Sarma and MIT postdoc Jonathan Jesneck – that computationally combines many different images taken with an inexpensive low-resolution infrared camera to produce a high-resolution mosaic image.


News from EMVA By Thomas Lübkemeier


The European machine vision industry has had a successful 2014, which closed with an estimated five per cent market growth. Furthermore, all the indicators point to continued positive business development in 2015 as well. Despite the high demand in production related applications, fresh stimuli comes more often from non-industrial markets such as ITS and medical, as well as surveillance and monitoring tasks in the wider area of entertainment, sports, and marketing, to name a few.


Evidence of these trends can


be found in the results of the EMVA quarterly market data survey on machine vision sales in Europe, which measures actual and past turnover numbers, as well as the sales expectations of the participating companies. The survey has successfully passed the set-up phase in the course of last year and all contributing companies have already received the resulting European Machine Vision Sales Report for the second and third quarter 2014, with


10 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • February/March 2015


the fourth quarter survey still running. Thanks to the cooperation agreement between EMVA and AIA, all companies contributing to EMVA’s quarterly market survey are eligible to receive the quarterly North American market report as an additional benefit. If you want to join and receive reliable data on the European vision market, please contact the EMVA at market.data@emva.org for more information. Another focus EMVA has for


2015, which is without the Vision


trade fair, is closer coverage of major trade shows and their relevance to the machine vision industry, including Hannover Messe, Control in Stuttgart, SPS in Parma and Laser World of Photonics in Munich. Last but not least, the main event in 2015 for the European machine vision community will be the EMVA business conference, which takes place from 11 to 13 June in Athens. Registration is open at www.emva.org/athens and more details about the programme are underway.


@imveurope www.imveurope.com


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