Vision Squad helps customers adapt flexible systems
Steve Scheiber, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 6/24/2008 10:47:00 AM
A vision system’s flexibility can be self-defeating if users can’t adapt the capabilities to a specific application. Sifting through an abundance of features to find the subset most appropriate for each situation can prove daunting. Vendors offer assistance, but their intimate knowledge of their products gives them a perspective that differs from that of their customers. Enlisting the aid of experts in the customer base may help, but questions of confidentiality and the limited transferability of solutions from one user to another compromise the efficiency of that approach.
What if a vendor provided expert users directly? A handful of engineers with a wide range of experience could dramatically reduce the learning curve for implementing a new inspection component or extending one to a new product or process. As those engineers continue to aid customers, they gain valuable experience that provides them with even greater knowledge and expertise that they can take to each new challenge.
Establishing such a group of “users within a vendor” is the basic principle behind Matrox Imaging’s “Vision Squad,” a team currently consisting of four people who create proof-of-concept solutions to meet unfamiliar customer requirements. Arnaud Lina, imaging software manager who heads up the squad, described the mission this way: “The company supplies components to the machine-vision imaging industry. Customers have to integrate those components into their specific applications. Inevitably, there is often a gap between where the component functionality ends and where customers have to pick it up. The Vision Squad attempts to bridge that gap.”
Matrox Imaging supplies an imaging library containing hundreds of functions, each of which depends on numerous parameters and conditions. Even comprehensive documentation may not adequately clarify which functions best address a particular situation.
“In some ways, we offer too many options,” Lina continued. “Two features may appear to provide the same function, but not in the same way. We try to show customers how to balance the pros and cons to best suit their needs. For example, you can find the position of an object in a field using gray-scale correlation or geometric techniques. Gray-scale generally executes faster but works better with uniform lighting. The geometric technique typically runs more slowly, but it is more versatile. It can be calibrated, and can more easily cope with lighting variations, as well as variations in the scale, rotation, and translation of the target object.”
If a needed solution doesn’t already exist, the Vision Squad creates a workaround or pushes developers for a product enhancement. The intent is not to offer custom solutions, but to transfer knowledge between the company and its customers, thereby educating those customers so that they can customize their own setups.
“Customers may already have tried to develop solutions, but unsuccessfully,” Lina explained. “They send us their problem parameters, the outline of their proposed solution, and image segments that resulted from that solution through e-mail or similar means. We analyze the material, determine why their approach didn’t work, and offer alternatives, helping them to become more autonomous."
He concluded, “Vision is not a perfect or an exact science. Our customers will always need the advantages of our expertise, experience, and knowledge. The Vision Squad is our way of providing them.”
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