The company Firma Vision Tools Bildanalyse Systeme GmbH was founded in 1986 by Dr. Hermann Tropf. In 1998, the company moved into a new building in Waghäusel-Kirrlach, in 2019 the company moved into another new building in Waghäusel-Wiesental.
After a successful company history, it was taken over at 15.11.2024 by Atlas Copco. Website see www.vision-tools.com.
This side describes interesting aspects of the back story before Vision Tools existed:
Back story
Long before VisionTools existed, the company founder Dr. Hermann Tropf had been scientifically involved in the field. As head of the machine vision group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing in Karlsruhe (today IOSB), he was one of the pioneers of industrial image processing. Theoretical work was awarded prizes (IEEE Computer Society Pattern Recognition Award 1980, German Association for Pattern Recognition extra award 1987), pioneering practical applications successfully ran over the long term at VW, Ford and Siemens. See Gruppe Fraunhofer (in German)
A fundamental work on multidimensional range search in mass data found its way into diverse technical applications and into today commercial big data systems. See: Z-Curve LITMAX / BIGMIN, History and Applications
Details: DB-Code Details EN
Concerning the key funcion (LITMAX / BIGMIN) you will find an extensive introduction, the key code for 2D and 3D, to be enhanced easily to nD, and final remarks, e. g. for the realization for Floatingpoint Data and possibly negative Data.
See: DB-Code and explanations.