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Special Features Highlights 2007 p1 of 4:

• Industrial lens for low-light imaging
  When a moth flies at night, its eyes need to capture all the light available. To do this, certain species have evolved nanoscopic structures on the surface of their eyes which allow almost no light to reflect off the surface and hence to escape.
• Vision and robots team for furniture packing
  Svedplan (Alingsås, Sweden), part of the Licentia Group and a producer of flat pack furniture, has used eight robots from ABB to improve competitiveness and reduce risk to manual handlers.
• Imaging software performs affine functions in real time
  Using a groundbreaking technique developed in astronomy, researchers at the University of Edinburgh can register complete 3-D image volumes to subpixel accuracy in real time.
• Vision systems capture quality at DaimlerChrysler
  In the cylinder-head production section at DaimlerChrysler, German automobile manufacturer, robust and reliable vision sensors are being used to identify the fitted parts using a Data Matrix code. The technology ensures part traceability.
• Bringing computer vision into focus
  By W. Conard Holton At the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition this year, Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA, USA; research.microsoft.com) presented papers highlighting research in computer vision. These ranged from noise removal from digital images and techniques for building 3-D models to handwritten signature verification and image recognition and search algorithms.
• Computer graphics meets machine vision
  At the SIGGRAPH conference this year, Henrik Wann Jensen, a computer science professor at UC San Diego (San Diego, CA, USA), presented a computer graphics model capable of generating realistic milk images based on fat and protein content. "If you tell the new computer graphics model how much fat and protein you want in your milk, the model generates the information to create a life-like milk image by determining how light will interact with a specified ratio of milk fats and proteins."
• Faces reveal genetic conditions
  "Many genetic conditions affect the development of the face," says professor Peter Hammond of the UCL Institute of Child Health (London, UK). "Hammond has developed software that compares a 3-D picture of a child's face with other faces, to see which abnormal face fits most closely. The image of the abnormal face is a composite of between 30 and 150 children with that condition.
• Rescuing recorded sound from silence
  Imaging technique helps recover sound from old record disks.
• System inspects circuit breakers
  Automated system uses multiple images to check parts and provide traceability of numerous components.
• Laser scanning helps blow-mold manufacturing
  Rather than traditional CMMs, designers of molds for bottles and other beverage containers are turning to laser scanning.