Time of flight
I read with interest the article “CMOS single-chip sensor captures 3-D images” by Andrew Wilson (Vision Systems Design, July 2004, p 7), and I must comment that Canesta (San Jose, CA, USA; www.canesta.com) is not the only company that has used and published data regarding the time-of-flight principle for capturing 3-D images. Unfortunately, Wilson missed mentioning sources in Europe that have also worked on this technology. One of these organizations is CSEM (Centre Suisse d”Electronique et de Microtechnique; www.csem.ch) in Zurich, Switzerland. Another is the University of Siegen (Siegen, Germany; www.uni-siegen.de), where Rudolf Schwarte holds the first patents on the principle. Prof. Schwarte was nominated last year for the German Future Prize, awarded by the German government for outstanding scientific innovation.
Data sheets of products with two different special image sensors that use the time-of-flight principle can be found both at CSEM and PMDTechnologies (Siegen, Germany; www.pmdtec.com). The principle and the detector have been well described in numerous technical papers dating back to 1999. They can be viewed on the CSEM website at www.csem.ch/fs/vision.htm.
Gerhard Holst
PCO AG
www.pco.de
Machine vision in Taiwan
I just read your Inside Vision column in the May 2004 issue of Vision Systems Design (p. 5). As a value-added distributor in machine vision, the updated market status is quite important for us to make our product line “time to market.” Recently, more and more clients are evaluating putting vision systems into their factory floors here in Taiwan. Even though we do not have an official forecast number for the demand of vision systems, we strongly believe that the growth rate is at least 30% in revenue, based on our company sales.
Ken Chou
Deputy Manager
G4 Technology Co. Ltd.
www.G4.com.tw
