Trends emerge

We hosted our third Annual Innovators Awards ceremony on April 3 at Automate 2017. Vision Systems Design developed this program to recognize some of the varied and innovative technologies, products, and systems that have emerged in the machine vision and image processing marketplace.

Each completed entry was impartially judged on originality and innovation, along with their positive impact on designers, systems integrators and end users. Judging criteria also included whether the product fulfils a need in the market that is not already addressed, and whether it leverages a novel technology.

The judging panel consisted of esteemed experts from academia, as well as system integrator and end-user companies. At the ceremony, awards were given out in four different levels-Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum-to companies or organizations that demonstrated excellence in a product or technology, an application, or in research and development.

Though not every honoree could personally attend the ceremony in Chicago to be publicly recognized for their achievements, on page 14 of this issue, Senior Web Editor James Carroll recognizes all of this year's 43 honorees in his 2017 Innovators Awards cover story.

While editing the article and considering the types of products being honored this year, a few technology trends appear to have emerged.

First is machine learning. Six of the 43 honorees have developed products relating to machine learning or deep learning, or artificial intelligence of some type. That's almost 14%. In retrospect, a much smaller percentage of honorees had developed AI or machine learning-related technologies in 2016 and 2015, even if products solely focused on algorithm development rather than hardware are included.

Two other categories also appear to have an increased presence among this year's honorees: embedded vision and multispectral imaging. In recent months, we've published many articles on machine learning, embedded vision and multispectral imaging. However, in this issue, we have two articles about something completely different.

In the first, Dr. Simon Walker describes how scientists from Oxford University's Department of Zoology have designed a high-speed imaging system to record the subtle three-dimensional wing movements of mosquitoes.

In the other article, Vision Systems Design European Editor Andy Wilson looks at the many companies that manufacture UV, visible and IR LED ICs and chip-on-board (COB) modules, and how designers, developers and integrators of LED illumination products can take advantage of the numerous LED products that span the UV, visible and IR spectrum. As always, I hope you enjoy this issue.