During the VISION 2012 show in Stuttgart, Germany, three international machine vision associations established a joint initiative to develop next generation standards for the machine vision industry.

The three organizations -- the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), Automated Imaging Association (AIA) and Japan Industrial Imaging Association (JIIA) -- created the Future Standards Forum (FSF) to investigate opportunities offered by new technologies and identify future challenges, as well as provide recommendations for new standards and the evolution of existing standards.

Additionally, the FSF aims to promote the re-use and harmonization of existing standards to minimize overlap between standards and prevent the duplication of work on the standardization front.

Because the machine vision market supports many industries, the FSF will also seek to collaborate with standards bodies outside the machine vision market, such as those in the commercial, automotive, medical, broadcast and military markets.

Having established the FSF, the three associations are now in the process of launching their first working groups. One of those will start working on a roadmap of interface standards that are already hosted by one or more of the associations or currently under development. Another working group will focus on lighting standards.

Recent articles on standards from Vision Systems Design.

1. Standard gives machine vision systems a new image

Vincent Rowley from Pleora Technologies describes the features and capabilities of the GigE Vision standard.

2. IEEE in camera-phone standardization efforts

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is to spearhead the development of a standard that is designed to specify methods and metrics for measuring and testing camera-phone image quality.

3. White paper explores USB 3.0 interface

Engineers at IDS Imaging Development Systems (Obersulm, Germany) have written a white paper that explores the objectives of the USB 3.0 standard.

-- Dave Wilson, Senior Editor, Vision Systems Design