Research Directions in Industrial Machine Vision: A Workshop Summary

Within the general discipline of computer vision are a number of application areas sufficiently distinct to warrant identification as separate fields. One of these is the application of computer vision to problems found in the industrial and manufacturing domains. Industrial machine vision is simply the use of computer processing of images, usually visual, that are part of the manufacturing process. Robot vision and automated visual inspection are complementary areas of this same field. Analysis of nonvisual images based on range data, tactile sensors, or other array presentations of physical parameters is also part of industrial machine vision. Unique characteristics of this field include the abilitynecessity, in fact-to control the visual environment, well-defined performance and success criteria, and an extreme sensitivity to system cost and performance measures. In general, there is good control of the variability that can occur in images, although such images may not be particularly simple.