At The Vision Show 2016 from May 3-5, I held numerous conversations to with industry experts to discuss the latest in vision. One such conversation was with Paul Saunders, President, PixeLINK, during which we discussed emerging trends and applications, for both his company and the industry overall.
PixeLINK’s latest product, a line of USB 3.0 autofocus M12 (S-Mount) cameras, feature integrated autofocus liquid lenses. Saunders explained to me that this is a product that the company had been mulling over, but a customer pushed them to develop and release it. While he wasn’t able to go into detail, he told me that the customer was in Asia and intended to use the camera in a biometric application based on facial recognition.
In terms of his view of the machine vision market on the whole, Saunders felt that the market was growing, but not necessarily growing at a rapid rate. (This sentiment can perhaps be corroborated by a recent AIA report that shows that the market actually contracted in Q1 after several periods of growth.) For his company, however, things are going quite well.
"It’s interesting, we are ahead of last year, and ahead of plan, actually," he said. "A lot of our focus has been on the USB3 market, which is growing quite rapidly."
Applications that show promise, according to Saunders, including medical devices, biotech, biometrics, and of course, machine vision. Additionally, Saunders cited the market for UAVs, among others.
"The drone marketplace is robust and will continue to be," he said. "We also like embedded systems, where there should be a lot of growth. There are so many possibilities within it."
He added, "USB 3.1 will also be big, as well as multi-camera applications," he said. "With these, come more throughput, which will make inspection applications much more sophisticated."
In terms of the immediate future, and where there is a "next big thing" on the horizon, Saunders spoke in general terms.
"It’s a rare concept," he said. "My belief, ultimately, is that the bigger the bus, the more you’ll see the industry evolve. There will be many opportunities to develop so many different types of vision applications in the future."
As part of our 20th anniversary, we have also spent some time asking industry veterans to make some predictions on where the industry could be in 20 years. When asked this, Saunders said:
"It will be a whole lot easier to develop and deploy a vision application. A lot of 'handcrafting' will go away, and it will be that much easier. And when it becomes easier, then people will become a lot more creative."
View more information on PixeLINK.
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