Industry News May 30, 2018

Shaping machine vision standards at IVSM

The words “machine vision standards” under a magnifying glass

This month’s IVSM in Frankfurt was the biggest ever, with attendees for the OPC UA Machine Vision meetings boosting numbers to around 140, and with more machine vision standards and meetings than ever, the schedule for the week was very full! Active Silicon’s CTO, Chris Beynon, reports back.

Camera Link surprise

Following the recent approval of v2.1, the Camera Link meeting was expected to concentrate on defining a significantly enhanced v3.0. Instead, the unexpected result was to drop v3.0 and quickly set a v2.2 by adding GenCP. The expectation is that Camera Link will then shift towards maintenance mode, to allow continued support for Camera Link frame grabbers and products for many years to come.

Progress for CoaXPress

CoaXPress, under Chris Beynon’s chairmanship, concentrated on two key topics. Firstly, the committee reviewed the outstanding topics to allow CXP v2.0 to go to ballot shortly. Secondly, the recent conclusions of the CCRC group (who had been tasked to suggest options to avoid competition between CoaXPress and Camera Link HS in the optical sector) were studied. The CoaXPress committee was very positive about the group’s proposal, which maintained the majority of CoaXPress’ protocols and investment by companies in Intellectual Property, while basing the lowest levels of the protocol stack on an enhanced version of the Camera Link HS format. More work will be undertaken to review this proposal in detail.

Further developments

The GenICam meeting concentrated on completing the next release, which would have been v3.1 but is now expected to have a new name reflecting the year and month of release, possibly 2018.06. Several presentations also examined the current hot topic of embedded vision.

There was also plenty of discussion around the forthcoming GenDC standard (previously called GenSP) that will define the way that image data is transmitted and potentially stored. Many of the meetings – from GenICam through CoaXPress to USB – discussed this, with the main debate being about the balance of future extendibility versus current complexity. Some simplifications were agreed which seemed to be generally supported.

In the PlugFest, Active Silicon tested its brand-new low-cost single channel CoaXPress frame grabber, as well as participating in the second ever Camera Link PlugFest ready for certification of our products to the new v2.1 standard. See more about the benefits of our industry-leading frame grabber range here.

The next IVSM will be in Austin, Texas, starting 17th September, where the work will continue. Keep up to date with machine vision standards and industry updates by following us on social media and subscribing to our newsletter.