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Slice of life: I worked for a company in 2000-2001 that had a small branch that built custom industrial machine vision systems. It was probably the most fun I
by fogus 15y ago
Slice of life:
I worked for a company in 2000-2001 that had a small branch that built custom industrial machine vision systems. It was probably the most fun I've ever had in my career. Anyway, one day the head of the branch gathered everyone together and talked about how he wanted to break off from the master company and build a machine vision startup. Everyone was extremely excited and most agreed to follow him on the spot.
One week later 9/11 happened.
One week after that the same branch head gathered everyone together and laid off 80% of the staff. You see, "industrial machine vision was no longer viable"[1]. We were crushed and I moved on to other fields.
I haven't though about machine vision much in the past 10 years, but I think I'll read this book. Thanks for the submission.
[1]: Vision system to seek and destroy on the other hand...
- zwieback 15y agoI worked in industrial machine vision from about 1990-2005. What we saw happening was a gradual shift from dedicated systems with DSP and specialized hardware to PC framegrabbers with most processing on the host to firewire and cameralink cameras with everything on the host. The libraries from Cognex and Matrox as well as open-source solutions have become so good and easy to use that some of the mystique of machine vision has disappeared. I think there are still tons of interesting machine vision applications but the systems development itself has become largely commoditized.
- Nate75Sanders 15y agoEh? Strange. 9/11 was, as terrible a tragedy as it was, great for computer vision. DHS and DOD were throwing money left and right at researchers and companies (through SBIRs), though mostly for surveillance, activity recognition, vehicle recognition, not industrial machine vision, as far as I'm aware. I wouldn't expect a large company to pivot, necessarily, but if the branch head wanted to do a startup, he probably missed out on a huge opportunity.
- fogus 15y agoDHS and DOD Hence my note Vision system to seek and destroy on the other hand...
- scotto 15y agoYup. Machine vision has rekindled my love of computer science since I fell into it early this year. And OMG the possibilities are endless! BTW: Richard Szeliski has an excellent free PDF book too.