Green light for machine vision

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.

As part of the international drive toward intelligent systems, transportation applications can measure the flow of highway traffic for speed and law enforcement, inspect and track containers on trucks and trains, and determine the condition of pavements, highway infrastructure, and rail beds. These issues and opportunities are introduced in our cover story—a new column on transportation imaging by system integrator Ned Lecky.

Transportation safety is also highlighted in an article that describes how engineers at Safety Vision and researchers at Oklahoma State University have developed a robotic crack inspection and mapping (ROCIM) system that can conduct accurate assessments of cracking on bridge decks.

Several other articles in this issue describe the contribution machine vision and image processing are making in the field of medicine. One article investigates a vision system capable of inspecting for abnormalities in medical fibers (sutures) at high speed and with high resolution. Another shows how an automated microscopy system reads microbead barcodes, improving in vitro diagnostics while reducing diagnosis times from months to hours.

A new journey …

This issue marks the end of my tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Vision Systems Design. I have accepted a new position as Associate Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of a sister publication, Laser Focus World, with which I have been associated for many years. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our readers and advertisers, as well as my colleagues at Vision Systems Design for the privilege of working with them over the past eight years.

I am also pleased that Andy Wilson, founding editor of this publication, will be taking over the role of Editor-in-Chief. Andy has been the technical mainstay of Vision Systems Design since its beginning 14 years ago, writing many of the articles that have established it as the premier resource for machine vision and image processing. His technical knowledge, publishing experience, creativity, and humor will serve our audience well. I wish him all the best.