Our Company

Emergent Design was founded in 2011 when a mutual friend, installing equipment in a factory, was amazed to find that quality control was being carried out manually by a person with a big red button. Surely, he reasoned, it would be better to use computer analysis to determine the quality of the end product?

It turned out that computers weren’t being used because getting one to replace an expert observer is a hard problem that stumped everyone who’d tried to solve it so far. We enjoy solving hard problems, so when we heard about this we decided to have a go.

With our hardware partners and European service engineers we’ve developed and installed systems which solve that problem. Our machines are in operation 24/7 analysing the shape, size, thermal and visible properties of products rolling along conveyors in factories across Europe.

Countries of EuropeA blank Map of Europe. Every country has an id which is its ISO-3166-1-ALPHA2 code in lower case. Members of the EU have a class="eu", countries in europe (which I found turkey to be but russia not) have a class="europe". Certain countries are further subdivided the United Kingdom has gb-gbn for Great Britain and gb-nir for Northern Ireland. Russia is divided into ru-kgd for the Kaliningrad Oblast and ru-main for the Main body of Russia. There is the additional grouping #xb for the "British Islands" (the UK with its Crown Dependencies - Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man) and the Kingdom of Denmark (Denmark, Faroe Islands, Greenland) Contributors. Original Image: (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Europe_countries.svg) Júlio Reis (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tintazul). Recolouring and tagging with country codes: Marian "maix" Sigler (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Maix) Improved geographical features: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:W!B: Updated to reflect dissolution of Serbia & Montenegro: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Zirland Updated to include British Crown Dependencies as seperate entities and regroup them as "British Islands", with some simplifications to the XML and CSS: James Hardy (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MrWeeble) Validated (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CarolSpears) Changed the country code of Serbia to RS per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_country_codes and the file http://www.iso.org/iso/iso3166_en_code_lists.txt (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:TimothyBourke) Uploaded on behalf of User:Checkit, direct complaints to him plox: 'Moved countries out of the "outlines" group, removed "outlines" style class, remove separate style information for Russia' (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Collard) Updated various coastlines and boarders and added various islands not previously shown (details follow). Added Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh as disputed territories. Moved major lakes to their own object and added more. List of updated boarders/coastlines: British Isles (+ added Isle of Wight, Skye, various smaller islands), the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Kaliningrad Oblast of the Russian Federation (and minor tweaks to Lithuania), Estonia, Ukraine, Moldova (minor), Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, F.Y.R. Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Croatia, Italy (mainland and Sicily), Malta (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Alphathon). Added Bornholm (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Heb) Released under CreativeCommons Attribution ShareAlike (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/).

European installations and operations

"Blank map of Europe" by Maix 🅭 🅯 🄎

Our Technology

We build solutions using our own high-performance software infrastructure which features

  • Camera acquisition, calibration and control
  • Parallelised and modular image processing pipelines
  • Custom machine vision algorithms
  • 3D scanning technology
  • Browser-based user interfaces
  • Protocols and APIs for systems integration
  • Data gathering

Along the way we’ve developed some open-source libraries that we use extensively throughout our framework.

A decade of commits

Our products use custom hardware developed by our partners Perception Sensors and Instrumentation which include

  • Global shutter cameras
  • Visible and NIR lighting modules
  • Control boards for lighting and sensors

They also design the housing, metalwork and cooling systems for our products.

A custom onboard server cabinet

All of our software is developed and deployed on Ubuntu Linux with the following tools and libraries of particular note

  • Clang for compiling our C++17 codebase
  • Dart for building Angular user interfaces
  • Tensorflow for training and running convolutional neural networks
  • Armadillo for linear algebra
  • CUDA for speeding up specific image processing algorithms
  • Redis as both database and cache
  • Sublime Text and VSCode as development environments
  • Gitlab to manage our repositories and provide CI/CD
  • Earthly for container-based builds that are repeatable locally and on the build server

Our Logo

Emergent Design logo

Our logo is formed from the first four squares within a Fibonacci rectangle which have been translated and rotated. Clicking on the logo will reveal the source rectangle.