The China International Machine Vision Exhibition in Shanghai (March 22-24) showed the beginning of an industry in rapid growth to support a booming economy. The exhibition attracted approximately 3500 attendees--overwhelmingly from inside China--and 64 exhibitors. A concurrent forum on machine-vision technology and products featured speakers from several Chinese companies and institutions and foreign vendors. Zhang Qiang, deputy general secretary of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society (Beijing, China; www.cmes.org.cn), the show organizer, stressed the importance of machine vision to China's growth.
Jeff Burnstein, executive director of the Automated Imaging Association (AIA; Ann Arbor, MI, USA; www.machinevisiononline.org) led a delegation of 15 AIA member companies attending the show and told the forum that the AIA was "very serious about working with the Chinese machine-vision industry." Chinese exhibitors and attendees ranged from distributors of products from international vendors, to developers of original components and systems, to dedicated system integrators-and some were a combination of all three. Shanghai Kingtek (Shanghai, China; www.kingtek.net), for example, displayed a complete fastener-sorting machine that uses four Impact cameras from PPT Vision (Eden Prairie, MN, USA; www.pptvision.com) and has sold 10 to Chinese end users. Beijing JoinHope Image (Beijing, China; www.kjk.com.cn) exhibited a range of CCD and CMOS cameras, along with image-processing boards that included a new PCI Express-based model; a GigE camera will be release soon.
Shanghai Ruishi Machine Vision Technology (Shanghai, China; www.machinevision.cn) showed its EagleEye series of smart cameras and industrial digital cameras equipped with CCDs and a 32-bit TI DSP-based board. General manager David Shi said his company has had considerable success selling its cameras for traffic surveillance and bridge structural monitoring. They have not aggressively developed smart cameras yet because the market is not yet sophisticated enough for customer programming.