Visionary Insights:

Back at university, computer vision was the topic of my thesis and I have been following the research for personal interest. In my opinion, there is always a delay between state-of-the-art technology from research to industry, I know of cases where e.g. technology developed in 2009 in the lab was then introduced to the market in 2015.

However, in our SMT and THT manufacturing industry the situation is a not that bit different, I believe many state of the art technologies are not yet used in the key processes. But for different reasons!

The basic applications are already sufficient for the current processes. As we can fix and calibrate the position of the camera it becomes easy to work with different pictures of an ideal picture by using a simple pattern matching algorithm. Computer vision is capable of working with not defined positions through SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). One of the core processes which enable high degree quality control within the SMT production environment, is parts recognition and 3D reconstruction. With the help of our multi camera type 3 we can generate a 3D multi-view vision. This process can be done quickly and easily as camera positions are fixed and known. Inspection machines within the industry often use at least 8 simultaneous views of the same object in order to get high multi-view visions. However, in my opinion, computer vision could be used for even more complex applications within manufacturing, because the same multi-view model reconstruction methodology could be used to generate a freehand television application. It might give us the opportunity to create videos and freely choose viewpoints which we have never been recording from. This is particularly useful for training or maintenance tasks, as it allows for the generation of virtual pictures from even the most inaccessible positions, where taking a normal picture would be impossible.