A July 27 initial determination by the International Trade Commission (ITC) will keep machine vision manufacturer Cognex Corp. in litigation mode as it pursues three alleged patent infringements by MVtec Software GmbH, which designs standard software for machine-vision applications.

At issue is whether the German software designer, by importing and selling its general-purpose machine vision software HALCON in the United States, violated patent rights held by Cognex. Massachusetts-based Cognex asserts that MVTec’s software does exceed allowable limits for matching technology. The ITC ruled that two of the patents in question were not infringed. Cognex plans to take the matter before the full commission in November.

“For the past 20 years, Cognex has been recognized as the pioneer of the geometric pattern-matching methods which are at the heart of this case,” says Robert Shillman, Ph.D., Cognex’s chairman and CEO. “Our company has invested significant resources to develop this innovative technology, which has brought enormous value to industrial automation worldwide, and we believe we have justly earned the protection granted to us by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.”

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