The machine vision industry has seen significant growth over the past 20 years, establishing its importance as an indispensable aspect of manufacturing. The market growth of automation and robotics is an important factor for the machine vision industry, as automated technologies rely heavily on machine vision to perform their tasks effectively.

Developments in image registration, computer vision, deep learning and other AI technologies are radically transforming the market. In the report Machine Vision and The Impact of Artificial Intelligence, ABI Research describes how deep learning is driving widespread adoption of machine vision in many sectors, including automotive, retail, consumer, industrial and surveillance. From autonomous vehicles to stores with robotic staff, machine vision is a key enabler.

The next milestone in machine vision

An important application of machine vision is quality assurance (QA). Here it helps manufacturers to determine whether their products are defective. Both regulatory and customer requirements regarding quality, combined with increasing competitive pressure, are prompting more and more QA managers to carry out a visual inspection.

Best practices in manufacturing require investment in machine vision QA products to detect defective products and, if possible, the reasons for them. Before the introduction of autonomous vision systems, there were countless challenges to overcome as solutions were complex, time consuming and expensive.

Due to the complexity of conventional machine vision solutions, a manufacturer had to commission an external system integrator to carry out the project - from creating proofs of concept and test plans to selecting a large number of different components and bringing them together in the form of a highly technical solution on the production line. Due to the expertise required, this was not feasible for the company's own factory personnel. Another challenge was the lack of flexibility of machine vision solutions. Even the smallest change to the environment or the product being inspected required the involvement of the system integrator once again.

To overcome these challenges, Inspekto has developed an autonomous machine vision system that enables manufacturers to benefit from visual QA at any point in their production - at a tenth of the cost and extremely fast installation. The system is suitable for any handling method and can be used for visual quality assurance, phase revisions and sorting.

The S70 consists of a single, stand-alone device that integrates software and hardware. It can be installed in less than an hour by your own staff and there is no downtime during the installation and setup of the system.