Tom Koopen
Tom Koopen is a highly experienced professional in computer vision and deep learning. He holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Physics from the University of Twente, specializing in optical measurement systems.
With over 25 years of experience in computer vision, Tom has worked with various companies in the Netherlands. Since 2013 he is an entrepeneur at “de tijdelijke expert”, assisting customers with the application of computer vision technology, focusing on measurements, identification, and sorting of products. Recently he founded “textilemining.eco” to build innovative machines for textile recycling.
He has designed lighting systems, selected and optimized cameras, and written software for thousands of hours. Some of his notable projects include inspecting plastic crates for contamination, improving the sorting of plastics, metals and flower bulbs. He developed a 3D scanner to recognize roof tiles for Luijtgaarden B.V. and measured colors during high-speed printing processes at QI Press Controls. Oh, and don’t forget the beer bottle inspection with 10 per second about 20 years ago.
Session
In the Netherlands plastic waste is often gathered in a dedicated container. These are collected in truck, that are emptied at a transfer station. Here a visual inspection is done to identify stuff that does not belong in this waste. We have researched the automation of this inspection using cameras and vision foundation models. All items in image of the big pile are detected, segmented and classified whether they belong to this waste stream.