Cameras and Accessories

My way or the highway

Sometimes we luck into the perfect career we always imagined-at other times the fates guide us down a wiser path.
Aug. 1, 2007
4 min read

Sometimes we luck into the perfect career we always imagined-at other times the fates guide us down a wiser path.

Some year’s ago, I worked for a public relations company in England. At first, I thought I would be extremely good at the job. Rather like journalism, the art of public relations involves visiting companies and writing stories about products, technologies, and applications. But the similarity ends there.

During my first month with the company, I was introduced to the managing director of a very large manufacturer of circuit breakers. The company was one of our largest accounts, and up until I arrived the work of public relations had been performed by a freelance writer who duly cranked out product press releases at the rate of one per month.

Having never really been a fan of writing just about products, I was positive I could improve both the quality and variety of these stories. Much to the astonishment of my boss, I presented the managing director with a complete list of technology and feature articles and product press releases that I was sure would improve the image of the company.

To achieve my lofty goal in the weeks that followed, I repeatedly insisted that the managing director supply me with the names of his customers and chief engineers. Unfortunately, the reception I received was rather cold to say the least. So much so, in fact, that my boss was duly summoned to the company and I was removed from the account.

Needless to say, it was a rather ominous beginning to a potential career as a public relations specialist. In the same vein, for the developer of machine-vision systems, listening to what the customer actually requires can be more important than the engineering involved in developing a product.

On a recent trip to England I visited a company building an automated system to inspect food products. The idea of the system was rather simple. Product batches moving along a conveyor belt were imaged by a CCD camera and their color images analyzed to check their quality.

Rather than perform the inspection in RGB space, the company had chosen to analyze the images in the more perceptually linear Lab space. Here, the idea of the system was to test whether each individual product in the batch fell within a specific acceptance limit. After processing, the results were displayed on a simple and practical, yet unglamorous graphical user interface.

THE IDEA GUY

Wouldn’t it be great, I asked my host, if you could implement the results in a three-dimensional Lab model. That way, as parts were inspected, the operator could see the results of each color inspection and the color limits being dynamically displayed in three-dimensions! Better still, such Lab analysis could be used to produce endless amounts of statistical data about each product.

Surely this was one of my better ideas. And yet, “Don’t say that in front of the engineers,” my host said jokingly, “or they might implement it!”

At this point, I was sure I was onto something. Surely, if the engineering department liked the idea, it would be instantly implemented, providing the customer with a lot more than they had asked for. Delving deeper into the design of the system, however, I discovered how the acceptance limits for the food product were determined and how, perhaps, my wonderful idea was not so practical after all.

The answer was rather simple. The manufacturer graded the quality and appearance of each food product visually and characterized them at a number of different grades. These data were then presented along with the product to the machine-vision system developer who characterized each one in Lab space.

There was no need to map each product within a glamorous 3-D model. All that was required was to analyze the data in Lab space and present a result. Rather than becoming completely enraptured in the capabilities of the technology, the system integrator had built a machine that performed exactly as the customer wanted.

Obviously my host had more “people skills” than I. And yet, I still think that my idea would have made a stunning technology demonstration. But perhaps that’s why I’m not in public relations anymore.

Click here to enlarge image

Andy Wilson
Editor
[email protected]

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