What are the benefits of applying machine vision to industry?

Unlike what some believe, artificial vision is not something of the future, but already part of the present of many industries and industrial processes that have understood that it is a powerful tool at their disposal to optimize their production process.

It is clear that technological advances have been responsible for the enormous change that has taken place in the industrial environment. Today, automation is already a reality and there are machines capable of carrying out processes that were previously performed by humans. This allows people to dedicate themselves to other more skilled and, in some cases, less repetitive and less physically demanding tasks.

First it was automation, and now it is machine vision that is responsible for another great revolution and paradigm shift in the industrial sector.

Machine vision is a system that allows machines to act as if they were a human eye, i.e., it allows them to see their environment, process the information they detect and understand what is in front of them. Machine vision allows machines to observe and analyze real scenes and make decisions based on what they see.

For example, in the quality control stages of industries, there used to be people in charge of looking at the products, one by one, to check that they were in optimal conditions and, in case of detecting any anomaly, to take the product out of the circuit to correct it. Nowadays, a machine with artificial vision can take care of that.

The following are some of the main benefits of applying machine vision to the industrial sector.

Despite all these advantages that machine vision brings to any industrial process, it would be dishonest of DEIMA not to recognize that it requires a significant economic investment to integrate it into production processes.

Without any doubt, one of the main advantages of machine vision is that it can be adapted to whatever the industry needs. However, some of the most common applications attributed to it are object detection, precise measurement tasks, error detection, image classification, feature matching……

Many companies use machine vision in inventory control and management. Its ability to read barcodes and labels is essential in this application. It can be used for inventory control and also to ensure that the necessary components are added to an assembly or assembly line.

The applications of machine vision also go beyond the four walls of an industry. For example, in the field of agriculture machine vision is integrated into harvesting machines so that they can pick bunches of grapes without destroying them. In the medical field, machine vision is used for diagnostics complex diagnostic tasksand in the pharmaceutical field to track ingredients and control quantities or expiration dates.