The Sporting Life
Lacrosse is not yet recognized as an Olympic sport, unlike other ball-handling games such as volleyball, water polo, basketball, and football (aka soccer). Often thought of as a strictly North American sport with its origin as a game played by the Iroquois Indian nations in upstate New York, the game itself, like so much else in culture and technology, is surprisingly international.
The sport’s governing body, the International Lacrosse Federation, organizes a World Championship tournament every year with members competing from countries as far afield as Australia, Britain, Bulgaria, Germany, and Korea.
Many of the same attributes required by lacrosse are also needed in the current business environment. Indeed, this month in Dublin, Ireland, the same need for precision, speed, discipline, and creativity will be topics for the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA) conference as it considers the state of the global machine-vision industry. With speakers from Brazil, India, Russia, and China, the conference will examine the markets and applications worldwide for machine-vision systems as well as the latest advances in digital camera interface standards.
Tools for the trade
Although international games of lacrosse have been dominated by American teams, who have won the World Championship every year except 1978, the same cannot be said for the machine-vision market. Indeed, while much of the original pioneering work was accomplished in the United States, many of the latest technological developments and applications are firmly global, as reflected in this issue of Vision Systems Design.
With articles discussing machine-vision case studies that range from sorting fish eggs to inspecting coffee packets and researching disease in human vocal folds, this issue spans applications articles from numerous countries including Germany and Norway. In his article on machine-vision benchmarking, for example, Wolfgang Eckstein of MVTec Software in Germany proposes a new machine-vision benchmark standard. This month’s Product Focus article by editor Andy Wilson is no less international, with vendors from Canada, the USA, and Europe describing how the increasing use of multicore processors is improving the performance of machine-vision systems.
Readers of Vision Systems Design can benefit from firsthand demonstrations from these worldwide companies who will be showing their latest machine-vision products, technologies, and applications from June 9–11, in Rosemont, IL, at the International Robots, Vision & Motion Control Show. Sponsored by the Automated Imaging Association, the show includes more than 120 exhibitors, a system integrators pavilion, and an extension technical conference.
Sports such as lacrosse may only be a metaphor for business. When considering current economic challenges, however, it makes sense to think globally with the precision, speed, discipline, and creativity such sporting activities demand.
W. Conard Holton, Editor in Chief
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