Personal observation on the machine vision industry

Citation

Meyer, F. (2000), "Personal observation on the machine vision industry", Sensor Review, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sr.2000.08720daa.002

Personal observation on the machine vision industry

Personal observation on the machine vision industry

The author Frank Meyer, is Director of Soft Automation. Previously he co-founded Integral Vision and did machine vision research at Cranfield Institute of Technology.

Keyword Machine vision

Introduction

As the co-founder of Integral Vision, a machine vision company, I thought it would be of interest to give some views on the machine vision industry.

Automation is becoming a software industry. As such we are seeing the beginning of a proliferation of software for automation components. Vision is just a subset of the general automation industry. To date, no vision software supplier is making money by only selling software. In fact, this is true for automation in general – no automation company is making money with software only products. Many companies are banking on the fact that this will change. The successful machine vision suppliers all focus on market niches, where the products they sell address specific applications. The most successful machine vision companies have aligned themselves with the semi-conductor industry.

The vision market is still small. To achieve growth we are seeing an increasing number of acquisitions, e.g. RVSI acquiring Acuity, Cognex acquiring Isys, Mayan, Image Inspection Ltd and the machine vision business of Komatsu, ESI acquiring AISI, Orbotech acquiring Schuh are just a few. Companies are continually entering and leaving the market. Intel and Microsoft are developing vision software which is available free of charge.

The machine vision suppliers fall into three categories, hardware and software component manufacturers, system integrators, and finally in-house developers. Many large machine vision users have developed their own hardware and software for their specific applications.

Trends

Both Microsoft and Intel are targeting the home consumer market. The implications for image processing has been the evolution of MMX, digital cameras and Firewire, i.e. fast digital networks for audio and video. These companies will introduce, and are introducing standards for image capture, storage and processing. By the nature of the size of the home consumer market this drives some of the machine vision market.

High definition TV will see the introduction of higher resolution cameras at a lower cost. Intel has announced PC camera designs and interfaces. Digital cameras are already storing images and doing some of the preprocessing.

Processing power doubles every 18 months, retailing for the same price and this is likely to continue for approximately ten years.

Color standards are evolving with calibration templates to ensure the color matching for the printing process.

With the emergence of BGA and bump wafers 3D image capture and X-ray image capture are gaining momentum.

To date, the vision suppliers have been concentrating on tools for the OEM market. There is a growing trend to build reconfigurable vision systems for the end-user market. Examples include Wit from Coreco, LabView from National Instruments and Checkpoint from Cognex.

Patents are taking a more dominant role in vision technologies. Nearly all major suppliers are pursuing patents. Having said this, I would also say that the basic image processing tools have not fundamentally changed. The list includes:

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  image filtering;

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  image/camera calibration;

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  image histogram analysis;

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  blob/connectivity;

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  edge/caliper tools and their geometric derivative;

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  contour finding;

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  vectorization;

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  correlation/search/pattern finder;

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  auto focus;

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  template matching;

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  texture analysis;

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  optical character verification/optical character reading;

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  illumination correction;

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  color measurement;

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  image mapping functions;

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  segmentation;

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  3D image capture.

Conclusions

There is no one vision supplier who has a monopoly on the best vision tool kit. The focus of different suppliers is being dictated by their revenue stream. To a large extent machine vision is a commodity item.

At this point machine vision cannot match what the human eye can do, so in this light we are still in the infancy of its potential.

Experience tells me that the ingredients of a successful company are imagination, inspiration and dedication, guided with direction.