Current page: Industrial Liaison->Goals

Goals
The primary goal of the Industrial Liaison Target Area is to identify application drivers, highlight any successes that are known to exist or that arise over the lifetime of the network, and to promote research trials on industrially-motivated applications. It is noteworthy that many types of industries need to be addressed in this activity since cognitive vision is likely play a large part in the implementation of intelligent interfaces for an enormous variety of products and systems. Consequently, the industries which stand to gain by the successful development and deployment of cognitive vision systems include, for example, the games and entertainment industry (e.g. gesture interfaces), white goods manufacturers (e.g. vigilant appliances), the construction industry (e.g. smart buildings), the medical industry (e.g. aids for the disabled), the security industry (e.g. remote monitoring), the automotive industry (e.g. monitoring driver behaviour) and so on.

As well as this inclusion of an ‘application push - R&D pull’ perspective in the activities of the ECVision and the promotion of cognitive vision, a second goal of the Activity Area is to ensure that both researchers and industrialists achieve mutually-consistent expectations of emergent technologies. In the past, vision researchers have often promised much and delivered little, leaving industry frequently disappointed. At the same time, industrial expectations of computer vision have also often been unrealistic, usually because it was assumed that visual abilities comparable to those of the human visual system would be easily achieved. On the other hand, there have been notable successes of industrial exploitation of computer vision, for example in the areas of visual inspection and metrology. These have usually been achieved by well-matched understanding of the true needs of applications and an understanding of the ability of the vision algorithms to deliver robust information. The only way to establish this mutual understanding is through dialogue between the three relevant communities:

  • Technology providers (i.e. the R&D community)
  • Vision system vendors
  • End-user application owners
ECVision will endeavour to foster constructive dialogue with industry along these lines. The central issues of such a dialog will be the following:
  • Identification of research and development problems, whose solution might lead to an immediate improvement of existing products.
  • Identification of research and development problems, whose solution might lead to new products.
  • Identification of new applications and the associated research and development issues.

Outcomes

  • Database of research profiles and application experience in the cognitive vision research community, indexed by application, R&D topics, industrial sector; this database will be developed in concert with that of the Research Planning Target Activity.
  • Directory of vision vendors, indexed by application, product type, deployed technology, industrial sector.
  • Database of application-motivated R&D problems and information on successful and unsuccessful approaches to solutions.
  • List of techniques and their usefulness (or not) in certain classes of problems.
  • Bi-lateral meetings with representatives of vision companies and industrial vision societies, typically six per annum.
  • Sponsorship of Best Application Development prizes in Cognitive Vision Systems.

Site generated on Friday, 06 January 2006