The UKIVA is delighted with the outcomes of two recent exhibitions: Photonex and the PPMA Show. At Photonex, overall attendance at the UKIVA “Vision in Action” conference was more than double that of previous years, while 19 UKIVA members who exhibited at the PPMA Show reaped the benefit of a steady stream of high quality visitors.
At this year’s Photonex exhibition, UKIVA ran its most ambitious seminar programme to date and was rewarded with significantly increased attendance figures. Copies of all of the presentations are available for download from the UKIVA website. Highly popular were the Keynote speech delivered by Dr. Will Maddern a senior researcher from the mobile robotics group at the University of Oxford, a talk on 3D vision techniques & applications and a discussion on the rise of the CMOS sensor.
Dr. Maddern’s talk focused on the challenges and opportunities of using vision in autonomous driving applications. This provided an overview of methods developed at the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group to perform calibration, localisation, mapping, navigation and obstacle detection in road scenes using cameras towards the goal of low-cost autonomy for road vehicles. The technology even has potential beyond its use for autonomous driving here on earth since the research team has also trialled the system on a prototype Mars Rover in tests in the Atacama Desert in South America!
UKIVA Chairman, Ian Alderton, said: “We have received very positive feedback both from those who attended the talks and from the speakers themselves, many of whom were engaged in further discussions following their presentations."
The PPMA Show also proved to be a great success for UKIVA members exhibiting there. Over 17% of visitors to the show registered vision as being at least one of their interests. Many UKIVA members were delighted with the depth of technical discussions they were able to have with their visitors about their practical application needs.
