Seize The Opportunity Of Rapid Growth in The 3D Vision Market, Build Your Own Brand, And Lead Domestic Substitution

3D vision is one of the most popular sub-sectors in the field of machine vision in China. The huge demand potential of the Chinese market is prompting more and more companies to enter the field of 3D vision. Coupled with the influx of capital forces with a keen sense of smell, the Chinese 3D vision market has ushered in unprecedented prosperity.

According to data released by Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII), the growth rate of China's 3D vision market exceeded 100% in 2021. It is expected that the scale of China's 3D vision market will reach about 3.5 billion yuan by 2023 and will exceed 10 billion yuan by 2025.

Onvision Intelligent (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Onvision) is one of the earliest domestic companies to independently develop 3D vision products. Mr. Na Qinglin, Chairman of Angshi, said in an interview with "Visual System Design" magazine: "Angshi has been involved in the field of 3D vision for many years. From the initial software development, to independent research and development, production of hardware, to the release of a higher-end 3D laser profiler in September this year, Angshi's 3D vision products have gradually won the recognition of customers, and sales have begun to increase significantly. It is expected that there will be a substantial increase of at least 50% next year."

Market opportunities for 3D vision

Compared with 2D vision, 3D vision can detect height or depth information, and has greatly improved image processing performance, software algorithms and hardware configuration; 3D vision can better perform multi-sensor fusion, and can convert target objects into three-dimensional point clouds with precise coordinates, which helps to broaden the fields that 2D vision cannot reach, thereby also promoting the rapid upgrade of traditional 2D machine vision to 3D machine vision.

"With the rapid growth of more and more domestic 3D vision manufacturers, market competition and technological progress will inevitably lead to a decline in the price of 3D products." Na Qinglin said, "When the price of 3D vision products drops to 1.5 times that of 2D vision products, or even to the same price as 2D vision products, customers will naturally prefer 3D products. The upgrade and replacement of 2D products is a big space for the future growth of 3D vision products."

Another growth opportunity for 3D vision products is also the most widely used high-end manufacturing fields such as 3C electronics, lithium batteries, and automobiles. These industries have extremely strict requirements on product production quality, and any minor defects may cause huge losses. The precise 3D point cloud map obtained by 3D imaging provides an effective way to escort these precision manufacturing.

Lithium battery manufacturing is a new high-growth market for 3D vision. With the proposal of the "carbon peak" and "carbon neutrality" goals, the rapid development of the new energy vehicle market has led to an explosive surge in the lithium battery market. China is a major lithium battery producer. According to the "Global Power Battery Installed Capacity Monthly Database", the global power battery installed capacity in February 2022 was about 25.77GWh, a year-on-year increase of 126%. my country's power battery installed capacity accounts for 51% of the world. According to data from Zhiyan Consulting, China's lithium battery industry investment has been heating up year by year in recent years. In 2021, China's lithium battery industry investment increased sharply to 927.6 billion yuan, an increase of more than three times year-on-year!

In lithium battery production, the application of 3D vision products covers raw materials and front-end processes, battery cell assembly, battery module assembly, battery pack assembly and other process links, and is an indispensable key tool in lithium battery production. The explosive growth of the lithium battery market will bring huge growth space for 3D vision products.

In addition, 3D vision products are also constantly expanding to new application markets, such as high-precision measurement and detection for wood processing, tile manufacturing and other industries. As the cost of 3D vision products gradually decreases, many applications that require both 2D information and height or depth information in the future will be application markets for 3D vision products.

Foreign brands account for 70%, where is the way out for domestic brands?

Onvision mainly provides 3D laser profiler products. According to Na Qinglin, 3D laser profiler products have entered the Chinese market for about ten years, and are currently mainly used in occasions with high requirements for 3D space size detection. Although many domestic 3D laser profiler brands have been launched in recent years, more than 70% of the entire market share is still occupied by foreign brands. Of course, from another perspective, this also means huge domestic substitution space.

With such a huge difference in market share, where are domestic brands lagging behind? When talking about this issue, Na Qinglin said, "To be honest, we can no longer see any essential difference between domestic and overseas brands in terms of product performance and stability. In fact, the core issue is that domestic brands need to win customer recognition."

A unique advantage of foreign brands is that they entered the Chinese market early and already have a good customer base; while the promotion of domestic brands and gaining user acceptance and recognition requires a certain amount of market cultivation time.

"3D laser profilers face customers with very high quality requirements, so you need to go through a lot of practical tests to make customers confident in your products. This is a promotion process that takes time." Na Qinglin said, "The best choice for domestic brands is to seize the development opportunities of the current 3D vision market, consolidate their core technologies, and concentrate on making good products to win more domestic substitution opportunities in future market competition."

Ascend has started selling LP series 3D laser profiler products since last year. With its extremely high cost-effectiveness, it has won a warm response in the market. In September this year, Ascend launched a new LP-8000 series 3D laser profiler. Recently, the monthly sales of Ascend's 3D laser profiler products have doubled. With the gradual growth and expansion of domestic brands, and their overwhelming advantages in cost, the market acceptance of domestic brands will become higher and higher.

The key to making a good 3D laser profiler

The 3D laser profiler is an industrial detection product that integrates various cutting-edge technologies such as optics, mechanisms, electronics, software, and algorithms, and is technically difficult and complex.

In terms of hardware, 3D laser profilers are mainly composed of core components such as high-performance lasers, low-distortion optical imaging components, high-speed imaging chips, high-performance FPGA & CPU chips. From the hardware level, except for individual customization, there is actually little difference between the products of various companies, and the most differentiated part is the software.

To make products that truly meet market demand, the most important thing that cannot be ignored is to have a deep understanding of customer needs. From the perspective of understanding customer needs, domestic brands have more advantages than foreign brands. After all, we have the same culture for the Chinese market.

"We will maintain close communication with domestic customers, and we will seriously consider the real needs of customers, and we will incorporate these needs into our product planning, and even customize products for customers." Na Qinglin said, "This is also the advantage of our domestic brands."

Understanding customer needs and being able to realize these needs in products is the hard-core ability. The core magic weapon of Angshi is software development capabilities. According to Na Qinglin, Angshi has a research and development center in the United States and has top development experts in the industry; these experts have rich experience in software algorithm development and have participated in the development of 3D laser profiler products of leading companies in the industry; therefore, in terms of software algorithm development, Angshi can be said to be on par with the top companies in the industry.

"In fact, Angshi has been studying basic image algorithms since 2015. At present, we are one of the few companies in China with more than 1,000 image processing operators. Before the project development of 3D laser profiler products, we have already conquered the core 3D image high-precision calibration technology in the product, which is the basis for the realization of 3D profiler functions, and this is also a technology that Angshi is very proud of." Na Qinglin said, "In addition, based on the demand for processing speed, we also maximize the processing performance of FPGA and DSP, so that the performance in image acquisition, data batch processing and other aspects has surpassed some foreign brands."

At the new product launch conference held on September 22, Angshi launched 6 LP-8000 series ultra-high precision 3D laser profilers in one go. The LP-8000 series uses high-performance lasers, customized large-aperture light-receiving lenses, E-ICMOS ultra-high-speed image sensors, and multi-core customized processors as core components in hardware, achieving new breakthroughs in performance.

The LP-8000 series has a z-axis accuracy of up to 0.3μm, an x-axis measurement width of 8mm~500mm, and an x-axis accuracy of 1μm~20μm. It supports high-dynamic acquisition and can trigger acquisition and transmission of up to 52,000 contours per second. With built-in multiple detection tools, users can easily complete the setting of product detection functions, and even achieve cascade work of more than 36 products, greatly improving detection efficiency.

The LP-8000 series can be widely used in 3C, new energy, semiconductors, automobiles and spare parts, logistics, food and other fields. It can easily detect highly transparent objects and is a powerful tool for PCB flatness detection, transparent glue road detection, and lithium battery weld detection.

It is particularly worth mentioning that the LP-8000 series has achieved new breakthroughs for domestic brands in the six-sided detection application of lithium batteries. The six-sided inspection of lithium batteries requires the inspection of defects on two large surfaces, two side surfaces, four edges, poles, caps, welds and explosion-proof valve areas. These defect types include scratches, depressions, protrusions, missing materials, flatness, the presence or absence of explosion-proof valve protective film, and dirt. There are two main difficulties in this inspection: one is that the scanning speed must be fast and the inspection efficiency must be high; the other is that the highly reflective surface or dirty surface must be able to be imaged stably to highlight various defect images. For a long time, the six-sided inspection of lithium batteries has only been achievable by foreign brands. The launch of the LP-8000 series fills the gap of domestic brands. Its scanning frequency can reach 52kHz, which can achieve high-speed image acquisition and high-speed inspection. In addition, its unique large-aperture optical design and automatic HDR function can ensure stable imaging regardless of color or material changes.

In 3D inspection applications, the most difficult ones are defect detection or high-speed inspection scenarios, and the main pain points are processing accuracy and speed. The core indicator of the laser profiler is the z-axis accuracy, but defect detection has relatively high requirements for the accuracy and resolution of the z-axis and the plane x y axis. "High resolution means high density of 3D point cloud and huge amount of data, so the data throughput and processing speed of the system are extremely high. In addition to using the FPGA and DSP of the 3D profiler for data processing, we are also trying to transfer the data to the GPU and CPU of the external industrial computer for processing to improve efficiency. This idea is also the first in the industry." Na Qinglin said.

For the 3D vision market segment, the current development situation is hot, which seems to be no exaggeration. With continuous capital investment, new companies have sprung up like mushrooms after rain.

Regarding the current development of 3D vision, Na Qinglin also gave his own views. "From the perspective of industry development, we are indeed very optimistic about this field. The industry itself will exist for a long time, and there is also very solid market demand. Industry 4.0 and machine replacement are the general trend." Na Qinglin said, "But we are also cautious about this industry. When the industry is overly hot, it is easy to have bubbles. The most important thing is to do a good job in core technology and products, and provide value to customers with product quality and win customer trust. No matter what the industry situation is, as long as we persist, this industry will definitely have Chinese companies similar to those foreign giants, which is also the development goal of Angshi."

In the final analysis, the foundation of an enterprise is actually very simple: to bring value to customers, let customers trust your product quality, and bring more benefits to customers.

Angshi pays special attention to the investment in core technology and is committed to providing more value to customers through software. "The PiqsX software we launched in September is actually a non-standard software customization platform. It has built a framework for customers. Customers only need to do a small part of the work according to their actual needs, which greatly simplifies the workload and improves efficiency." Na Qinglin said, "Before, only Cognex's VisionPro could meet such needs in China. Now PiqsX is comparable to VisionPro. This is the value we provide to customers."

In addition, in the development of 3D products, Angsight will fully consider customer needs from the early stage of product development and always develop in sync with the market. In addition to 3D profilers, Angsight is also developing products such as area array 3D cameras and high-precision displacement sensors. By gradually expanding the product matrix, Angsight can meet customers' various needs in spatial position and height detection applications to the greatest extent. Angsight has also independently developed 3DCloud detection software to provide customers with a complete set of 3D vision solutions.

"For us, now is the best time to seize the opportunity and further consolidate core technologies so that we can gain a firm foothold and gain market advantages in the fierce competition that follows, so as to strive for more opportunities for domestic substitution and shape the Angsight brand." Na Qinglin concluded.