Vision standards
What is IVSM (International Vision Standards Meeting) good for?
Machine vision engineers from all over the world have gathered from 07 to 11 October in Stresa (Italy) at the shore of Lago Maggiore for the International Vision Standards Meeting (IVSM) Fall 2019. This meeting takes place twice a year under the global G3 initiative which is supported by the machine vision associations AIA, CMVU, EMVA, JIIA and VDMA. But what is the IVSM good for?
(Bild: EMVA European Machine Vision Association)
Hosting association in Stresa was the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) together with the corporate sponsor Lakesight Technologies. Birger Engineering and iMGAGE S were co-sponsors of the event.
Standard Working Groups, Plugfest and FSF
Each machine vision standard has its own working group which works continuously on the further development of the standard. Standard group members are engineers from machine vision companies and machine vision scientists. They meet personally twice a year during the IVSM. At the fall 2019 IVSM in Stresa meetings took place from the standard working groups of CameraLink, CameraLink HS, CoaXPress, emVISION, GenICam, OOCI, and OPC-UA Vision. All standard working groups are open for new members who are interested to contribute with their experience. One highlight of each Standard Meeting is the Plugfest. During this event it is possible to test any existing or new device with most worldwide available host-applications for interoperability. As the Plugfest attendance is restricted to people from the standard working groups and/or programmers from the involved companies most problems can be discussed and sometimes even solved short-term without the usual barriers. The Plugfest has its roots in the development of the GenICam standard and nowadays includes practically all machine vision interface standards present during an IVSM. Last but not least, the Future Standards Forum (FSF) in its General Meeting session gives an update on all current machine vision standards.
Importance of standardization
Even after many years in the standardization community EMVA Standards Manager Werner Feith was once again impressed about the growing number of participants and the high-level output of the meeting. “Looking at the manpower and effort put into standardization makes clear that machine vision standardization cannot be taken for granted. A lot of industries look with envy at the level of commonly developed standards in the machine vision industry, where even engineers from competing companies jointly work together in the various standard working groups”, says Feith and adds: “As a machine vision association being part of the global G3 initiative the support of standardization activities is written in EMVA’s DNA. One cannot overestimate the value standardization has brought to our industry by means of facilitating machine vision applications and thus customer adoption of the technology; but also avoiding double developments.” The EMVA hosts several machine vision standards, e.g. GenICam and EMVA 1288. In addition to that two new standard initiatives were adopted recently. One is the Open Optics Camera Interface (OOCI) standard to control the camera optics through GenCP and SFNC. The second standard initiative is called emVision and aims to expand the application of GenICam into the embedded vision world combining the particularities of the machine vision industry and the embedded world.
