In his classic novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the green light of Daisy's dock as a metaphor for both the beginning and end of a journey and Gatsby's unattainable dreams and hopes for the future. For vision system integrators, red, green, and blue lights are signaling more attainable goals: the promise of new opportunities in developing sophisticated transportation imaging systems.

A major challenge in inspecting underground pipes for nuclear reactors is identifying corrosion. Currently, plant inspectors use indirect methods to monitor buried piping, such as generating a voltage gradient to identify areas of corrosion or using ultrasonic waves to screen lengths of pipe for cracks.

Automotive airbags must deploy within milliseconds to protect lives in the event of an accident. The bags themselves are inflated by highly compressed gas, commonly nitrous oxide contained in a metallic charger. Any defects in the cap or its valve could cause a partial or complete loss of gas before the airbag is triggered, resulting in insufficient pressure for the airbag to inflate properly.

Engineers at Ackley Machine Corp. have developed a tablet printing machine based around Cognex In-Sight vision systems that not only prints identification marks on tablets but also inspects them to ensure their integrity.

Ensuring the quality of rolled titanium zinc (TiZn) metal sheets used for roofing and wall panels in building construction is a demanding process, not in the least because the metal sheets have a reflective surface that makes identifying the appropriate imaging technology for an inspection system a priority.

After such tragic events as the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, MN, there has been increased awareness of the need to inspect the structural integrity of bridges throughout the United States. At present, this inspection is a dangerous manual process prone to human error and limited accuracy.

By combining photolithographic digital barcodes with immuno- and molecular chemistry, Applied BioCode Inc (Santa Fe Springs, CA, USA) has created a Barcoded Magnetic Bead (BMB) technology designed to improve the isolation and identification capacity of in vitro diagnostics.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a noninvasive imaging technique that enables visualization of tissue or other objects with resolution similar to that of some microscopes. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in OCT because it provides much greater resolution than other imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET).

Monofilament sutures (medical fibers) are manufactured using an extrusion process that requires tight quality control. To inspect these fibers, manual operators must accurately detect, localize, and catalog relevant manufacturing defects such as out-of-tolerance diameters, surface abrasions, internal flaws, gouges, and geometric abnormalities—a process that is both time consuming and subject to operator error.

In a world of constant change, personal and professional losses can inspire a team to perform to its best potential even in the face of uncertainty.