Content area
Full Text
IMAGE PROCESSING
Every year at the annual VISION 2008 tradeshow in Stuttgart, a particular com- pany is singled out to receive the VISION Award, donated by Messe Stuttgart to honor innovation in the machine-vision industry. Although past winners of the award have included such companies as Silicon Soft- ware (Mannheim, Germany; www.siliconsoftware.com) for its VisualApplets graphical software for FPGA processing and CMOSVision (Schaffhausen, Switzerland; www.cmos vision.com) for its Image Correction Processor, this year's winner was different.
Rather than bestowing the award on a particularly novel hardware or software development, the prize was awarded to Supercomputing Systems (Zurich, Switzerland; www.scs-vision.ch) for its leanX-cam intelligent color camera. Indeed, in his acceptance speech when receiving the award, Reto Bättig, department head of Supercomputing Systems, admitted that the technology behind the camera was not particularly innovative. Instead, the business model that the company plans to pursue to market and develop further smart camera products makes his company unique.
This business model is based on the concept of open-source computing for intelligent cameras. In the design of the smart camera, Bättig chose to interface a 1/3-in, 752 × 480 resolution, 60-frame/s CMOS sensor from Aptina Imaging (San Jose, CA; www.aptina.com) to a ADSP-BF537 Blackfin processor from Analog Devices (Norwood, MA; www.analog.com). The single-board smart color camera sports an Ethernet, RS-232, and digital I/O interfaces, 64-Mbyte SDRAM, and 8 Mbytes of onboard flash memory.
As can...