My Study / Research Experience in Taiwan

Machine Vision

By Victor Ham Choi, Yuan Ze University, ICDF Honduras

It has been a while since I arrived in Taiwan and by that time until now it has been a wonderful experience. I am taking a M.S. in Industrial Engineering in Yuan Ze University, one of the top private universities in Taiwan. This university is located in a town called Neili, is in between Taoyuan and Jhongli.

My study / research experience has been a little complicated since I decided to get into a one of the hardest fields in industrial engineering: the machine vision. Hard because is actually not like human vision, it involves more processing power and a series of expensive hardware like cameras, lenses and of course software programming and statistics knowledge. As a formal definition, machine vision, is computer vision applied to industry and manufacturing.The most common applications are the inspection of manufactured goods such as printed circuit boards, automobile parts, food and pharmaceuticals integrated in a system that can read bar codes, detect superficial defects or virtual measurement.

I chose this topic because I already have some experience in Industrial Automation (programmable logic controllers, sensors and actuators) and in my country a lot of expertise is needed in this field and especially with machine vision. Including these two useful areas in a whole will make an interesting project to implement in companies or for personal research. The trend in manufacturers in Honduras is that they are automating their processes in order to become competitive in the global business.Because of this more and more companies are choosing the automation as the right strategy to follow as a common way to succeed and to lower the operational cost in the long term.

In this semester I am taking specialized courses that will give me a better understanding of the problems in the real word and a better approach on how to solve them. Some of my courses talk about technologies that are being implemented in these days to solve communication problems, some other about transportation and logistics issues and some other in the design and manufacture field. There is a lot of work to do, always keeping all notes and printouts organized, reading papers until late night are very common daily tasks in masters student life.

Of course I am not alone in this long trip; I have a lot of people backing me up in this process, like my family, my friends from Honduras, Taiwanese and Internationals that I meet when I arrived to Taiwan. They gave to me a lot of their time, respect and all are very kind and friendship. A lot of people are impressed that I came from so far and traveled a large distance to study in YZU; but besides of that they always told me: “keep doing all good work that you are been doing.” I will always be in debt for all the support and thanks to all of them from the inside of my heart.

There are a lot of interesting topics that I would like to do some research on it, like production scheduling, computer aided design, computer aided manufacturing, virtual representation of products, industrial automation, artificial intelligence, computer vision, algorithm optimization and even more. As I can say, there is so little time and too much work to do that is impossible to learn every industrial engineering field so one of the best ways to proceed is to focus and master in one topic, my particular case: Machine Vision.

Some of the last words I will like to repeat in this essay are the ones that all friends and family always said to me every time that I talk with them: “Keep all the good work! no matter how hard is to complete or how long is it, keep it like that and you will see the big things that you will earn in the near future.” VH’07.