Application case studies

Machine Vision has been studied in universities, commercial companies, and various other research organizations for over 20 years. The world-wide market for vision-based products and services for industrial, medical, security, and other applications is already about US$4000 million per annum and is growing rapidly. However, it must be admitted that industrial Machine Vision is still in its infancy, in the sense that the technology is not widely understood by the general engineering and business fraternity. As a result, it is often mistrusted, misused, and underused. Recall that in Chapter 1 we pointed out that most people, including technologists, erroneously believe that they can explain how human beings see. It has been found by experience that “obvious” solutions to Machine Vision applications almost invariably do not work. Indeed, even an experienced vision engineer can only rarely predict correctly what algorithm will be most appropriate, if he is limited to viewing an object or scene by eye. The applications studies described in this chapter are intended to demonstrate this point, plus two others: a) The algorithmic/heuristic techniques described at length earlier in this book are capable of achieving technically-feasible solutions to a very wide range of applications. (Demonstrating commercial feasibility is a completely different question, and is beyond the scope of our present discussion.) b) Interactive image processing, as exemplified by PIP, is able to analyze a large proportion of interesting and commercially-important applications in a surprisingly short period of time.