Concurrent Engineering is a system of practices that companies can employ so that their engineering and production departments work

together in the most streamlined manner possible. When the processes between the two groups are organized correctly through a systematic methodology, the work flow and exchange of information is extremely efficient and problems that would otherwise slow down the processes are avoided. Potential benefits of Concurrent Engineering include a shorter cycle to get new product to market, a quicker turnaround time for issues with product quality that require engineering time and a smaller number of changes made to a product or its process during its life cycle. Another benefit is that employees then require less time learning how to produce new or improved products, thereby enabling engineers to have higher visibility when it comes to knowing exactly what is going on in the shop floor operations. Concurrent engineering also produces a continual streamlining of processes so they can continue to be consistently duplicated. Concurrent Engineering 2.0 focuses on the process by which a product is manufactured. The practices also prioritize the time spent putting together a manufacturing process which works to bring a quality product to market quickly and at a reasonable cost. The main ingredients of Concurrent Engineering are integrated tools and data. Though engineering and manufacturing are closely related, each department's tools and data are often managed separately, which can lead to inefficiencies. With Concurrent Engineering 2.0, the manufacturing data models are created directly from their engineering predecessors with tightly integrated change management. Integrated processes for managing changes and digital validation of the product and process streamline shop floor changes. Previously, the manufacturing shop floor would have to basically work around engineering. Often, changes would be tested on the shop floor, only to have to be redone and reworked on later. Integrating the processes eliminates this. Having a collaborative culture and environment also allows product engineers to spend a lot of time on the shop floor effectively evaluating the success of their designs. When the value in the corporate culture changes to emphasize reducing the number of changes in the process rather than being able to pump changes out more quickly, then Concurrent Engineering 2.0 strategies works at their best. Concurrent engineering is a business strategy which replaces the traditional product development process with one in which tasks are done in parallel and there is an early consideration for every aspect of a pr oduct's development process. This strategy focuses on the optimization and distribution of a firm's resources in t he design and development process to ensure effective and efficient product development process. In today's business world, corporations must be able to react to the changing market needs ra pidly, effectively, and responsively. They must be able to reduce their time to market and adapt to the changing environments. Decisions must be made quickly and they must be done right the first time out. Corporations can no longer waits time repeating tasks, thereby prolonging the time it takes to bring new products to market. Therefore, concurrent engineering has emerged as way of bringing rapi d solutions to product design and development process. Concurrent engineering is indisputably the wave of the future for new product development for all companies regardless of their size, sophistication, or product portfolio. In order to be compet itive, corporations must alter their product and process development cycle to be able to complete div erse tasks concurrently. This new process will benefit the company, although it will require a large amount of refinement in its implementation. This is because, concurrent engineering is a process th at must be reviewed and adjusted for continuous improvements of engineering and business operations. Potential Advantage of Using Concurrent Engineering Faster time to market which results in increased market share.* Lower manufacturing and production costs. Improved quality of resulting end products. Increased positioning in a highly competitive world market. Increased accuracy in predicting and meeting project plans, schedules, timelines, and budgets. Increased efficiency and performance. Higher reliability in the product development process. Reduced defect rates. Increased effectiveness in transferring technology. Increased customer satisfaction. Ability to execute high level and complex projects while minimizing the difficulties. Shorter design and development process with accelerated project execution. Higher return on investments. Reduction or elimination of the number of

design changes and re-engineering efforts at later phases i n the development process. Reduced labor and resource requirements. Ability to recognize necessary design changes early in the development process. Increased innovation by having all players participate in the concept development phase. Ability to design right the first time out / First time capabilities. Overlapping capabilities and the ability to work in parallel. Increased cohesiveness within the firm. Improved communication between individuals and departments within the firm. Lower implementation risks. Faster reaction time in responding to the rapidly changing market. Lower product and process design and development costs. Improved inventory control, scheduling and customer relations. Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see, where see in this case means that the machine is able to extract information from an image that is necessary to solve some task. As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory behind artificial systems that extract information from images. The image data can take many forms, such as video sequences, views from multiple cameras, or multi-dimensional data from a medical scanner. As a technological discipline, computer vision seeks to apply its theories and models to the construction of computervision systems. Examples of applications of computer vision include systems for: Controlling processes (e.g., an industrial robot or an autonomous vehicle). Detecting events (e.g., for visual surveillance or people counting). Organizing information (e.g., for indexing databases of images and image sequences). Modeling objects or environments (e.g., industrial inspection, medical image analysis or topographical modeling). Interaction (e.g., as the input to a device for computer-human interaction). Computer vision is closely related to the study of biological vision. The field of biological vision studies and models the physiological processes behind visual perception in humans and other animals. Computer vision, on the other hand, studies and describes the processes implemented in software and hardware behind artificial vision systems. Interdisciplinary exchange between biological and computer vision has proven fruitful for both fields. Computer vision is, in some ways, the inverse of computer graphics. While computer graphics produces image data from 3D models, computer vision often produces 3D models from image data. There is also a trend towards a combination of the two disciplines, e.g., as explored in augmented reality. Sub-domains of computer vision include scene reconstruction, event detection, video tracking, object recognition,learning, indexing, motion estimation, and image restoration. Applications for computer vision One of the most prominent application fields is medical computer vision or medical image processing. This area is characterized by the extraction of information from image data for the purpose of making a medical diagnosis of a patient. Generally, image data is in the form of microscopy images, X-ray images, angiography images, ultrasonic images, and tomography images. An example of information which can be extracted from such image data is detection of tumours, arteriosclerosis or other malign changes. It can also be measurements of organ dimensions, blood flow, etc. This application area also supports medical research by providing new information, e.g., about the structure of the brain, or about the quality of medical treatments. A second application area in computer vision is in industry, sometimes called machine vision, where information is extracted for the purpose of supporting a manufacturing process. One example is quality control where details or final products are being automatically inspected in order to find defects. Another example is measurement of position and orientation of details to be picked up by a robot arm. Machine vision is also heavily used in agricultural process to remove undesirable food stuff from bulk material, a process called optical sorting. Military applications are probably one of the largest areas for computer vision. The obvious examples are detection of enemy soldiers or vehicles and missile guidance. More advanced systems for missile guidance send the missile to an area rather than a specific target, and target selection is made when the missile reaches the area based on locally acquired image data. Modern military concepts, such as "battlefield awareness", imply that various sensors, including image sensors, provide a rich set of information about a combat scene which can be used to support strategic decisions. In this case, automatic processing of the data is used to reduce complexity and to fuse information from multiple sensors to increase reliability. One of the newer application areas is autonomous vehicles, which include submersibles, land-based vehicles (small robots with wheels, cars or trucks), aerial vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The level of autonomy ranges from fully autonomous (unmanned) vehicles to vehicles where computer vision based systems support a driver or a pilot in various situations. Fully autonomous vehicles typically use computer vision for navigation, i.e. for knowing where it is, or for

producing a map of its environment (SLAM) and for detecting obstacles Typical tasks of computer vision Each of the application areas described above employ a range of computer vision tasks; more or less welldefined measurement problems or processing problems, which can be solved using a variety of methods. Some examples of typical computer vision tasks are presented below. Recognition: The classical problem in computer vision, image processing, and machine vision is that of determining whether or not the image data contains some specific object, feature, or activity. This task can normally be solved robustly and without effort by a human, but is still not satisfactorily solved in computer vision for the general case: arbitrary objects in arbitrary situations. The existing methods for dealing with this problem can at best solve it only for specific objects, such as simple geometric objects (e.g., polyhedra), human faces, printed or hand-written characters, or vehicles, and in specific situations, typically described in terms of well-defined illumination, background, and pose of the object relative to the camera. Motion analysis:Several tasks relate to motion estimation where an image sequence is processed to produce an estimate of the velocity either at each points in the image or in the 3D scene, or even of the camera that produces the images . Scene reconstruction:Given one or (typically) more images of a scene, or a video, scene reconstruction aims at computing a 3D model ofthe scene. In the simplest case the model can be a set of 3D points. More sophisticated methods produce a complete 3D surface model. Image restoration The aim of image restoration is the removal of noise (sensor noise, motion blur, etc.) from images. The simplest possible approach for noise removal is various types of filters such as low-pass filters or median filters. More sophisticated methods assume a model of how the local image structures look like, a model which distinguishes them from the noise. By first analysing the image data in terms of the local image structures, such as lines or edges, and then controlling the filtering based on local information from the analysis step, a better level of noise removal is usually obtained compared to the simpler approaches. An example in this field is the inpainting.