Evolution of Machine Vision

1933 – Television system, the first practical electronic system for the transmission and reception of images is presented by a research group at RCA headed by Vladimir Zworykin.

1948 – Norbert Wiener, a professor at M.I.T., publishes ”Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”, a book that describes the concept of communications and control in electronic, mechanical, and biological systems.

1950 – James J. Gibson introduces the concept of optical flow which describes the apparent motion of individual pixels on the image plane.

1953 – FCC approves RS-170 image standard proposed by National Television System Committee (NTSC).

1957- NBS staff member Russell Kirsch creates the first-ever digital image.

1963 – Lawrence Roberts, the Father of Computer Vision publishes “Machine Perception Of Three-Dimensional Solids” where he discusses extracting 3D information about solid objects from 2D images. This lead to much research in MIT’s artificial intelligence lab and other research institutions looking at computer vision in the context of blocks and simple objects.

1966 – The summer project at MIT marks the landmark in the development of pattern recognition.

1970 – Hitachi R&D introduces HIVIP Mk.1, the first intelligent robot with a vision system.

1973 – Ethernet is developed by Bob Metcalfe at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

1974 – Robotic Industries Association (origin of AIA and A3) is founded.

1976 – Bruce Bayer, an American scientist invents Bayer Filter Array and brings color imaging to digital photography.

1978 – David Marr at the MIT AI lab creates a bottom-up approach to scene understanding through computer vision. This approach starts with a 2D sketch which is built upon by the computer to get a final 3D image.

1981 – General Motors Consight becomes the first machine vision system to go into production at the St. Catherines, Ontario, foundry and is successful in sorting up to six different castings at up to 1,400 an hour from a conveyor belt.

1981 – Intelledex Corporation founded by Rich Carone of Hewlett-Packard introduces first robot system with integrated machine vision platform

1984 – Automated Imaging Association (AIA) is established.

1985 – The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation present a handwritten kanji character OCR reader called OCR60 which becomes the first example of a large-scale system application of optical character recognition.

1993 – IEEE1394 standard is trademarked by Apple as FireWire.

1996 – 1394 Trade Association introduces DCAM/IIDC 1.04 protocol that describes the exchange of data with IEEE 1394 cameras.

1996 – Sony begins the development of the first CMOS image sensor “IMX001”.

1999 – Gigabit Ethernet’s most popular variant 1000BASE-T defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard is introduced by IEEE.

2000 – Camera Link standard is introduced by Automated Imaging Association (AIA).

2005 – Sony introduces its first Smart Camera.

2006 – Gige Vision is introduced by AIA to standardize the delivery of video and image data over Gigabit Ethernet networks.

2007 – Emergent Vision Technologies is founded in Vancouver, Canada.

2008 – USB 3.0 standard is introduced, offering more throughput and 10x faster speed than USB 2.0.

2008 – The concept of CoaXPress is first demonstrated at VISION 2008, in Stuttgart, Germany

2010 – Emergent Vision Technologies becomes the first company to release 10 GigE camera product line.

2012 – IIDC2 standard is introduced by 1394 Trade Association and Japan Industrial Imaging Association (JIIA)

2014 – Automated Imaging Association announces the introduction of USB 3.0 Vision standard.

2018 – Emergent Vision Technologies becomes the first company to release 25 GigE camera product line.