By Conard Holton
NOVEMBER 9--Warm, late autumn days have served as backdrop this week to record-setting attendance at the 18th gathering at VISION 2005--the International Trade Fair for Machine Vision and Identification Technologies (Stuttgart, Germany). The Killesberg site of the organizer, Messe Stuttgart, was sold out, with 196 exhibitors, and the first day drew more than 1700 attendees, up 17% from the previous year.
Patrick Swarzkopf, from the VDMA (German Engineering Association) and director of the European Machine Vision Association, presented results of a machine-vision market study based on data from 80 European companies in 16 countries. The aim is to analyze turnover of companies and shipments in terms of units sold and it was not using data from OEMs nor using the food chain analysis approach.
Initial results show that, as might be expected, Germany constitutes about 40% of the customer based, with about 14% in the Americas, and 8% in Asia. Exports are the primary motor of growth for the European machine-vision industry and the major market opportunity. The market in 2003 was about €2.1 billion; 2004 saw over 16% growth to €2.4 billion; and 2005 should see 12% growth to about €2.7 billion. Growth in Europe in 2006 is expected to soften to single digits, while the Americas and Asia continue to strengthen. Schwazkof noted that almost 25% of machine-vision growth was now taking place in non-industrial sectors such as transportation, biometrics, and document scanning.
And the winner of the annual Vision Award for best paper presented during the conference was CMOS Vision, based in Switzerland, for its image correction processor for real-time artifacts, which described a processing platform aimed at the automotive market that can be the interfaced between standard image sensors and digital output devices.