Trends in Automated Inspection Using Machine Vision Technologies

Since machine vision emerged as an engineering discipline supporting automation in the late 1970s, we have seen every aspect change dramatically. Cameras have changed from analog to digital with resolutions moving from VGA up to hundreds of megapixels. Lighting changed from incandescent, fluorescent, and strobe lights to almost all LED illumination. Computing power increased by several orders of magnitude. Software changed from mostly simple binary image processing to grayscale and more. Lens design and manufacturing technology changed to give higher resolution needed by today’s cameras.

As machine vision practitioners, we are constantly challenged by customers to tackle new problems. We need to know what new tools are becoming available, and learn how to best use these new tools.

So, what’s happening now to change the machine vision landscape? Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) are having an enormous impact. Three-dimensional (3D) imaging is now mainstream with new emerging technologies. Mainstream imaging has moved beyond the visible spectrum with many infrared (IR) imaging cameras now available. Multispectral and hyperspectral imaging are becoming widely available tools enabling applications that were previously impossible.

These trends and a few other areas to watch are the focus of this webinar.