What Can Machine Vision Do?

Most industrial machine-vision applications fall within one of four categories: gauging, guidance, inspection, and identification. Machine vision can solve the following applications:

• Robot guidance: Determine part position (x,y and angle) for robotic arm pick and place operations
• Identification and sorting: Determine the identities of objects and sort accordingly
• Part location: Locate at least one feature on a part for the purpose of calculating the (x,y) position and rotation of the part to position vision tools precisely
• Presence/absence checking, assembly verification: Verify that part components are present and in the correct locations
• Dimensional gauging: Calculate the distance between two or more points on an object
• Defect detection: Identify defects and calculate defect characteristics such as position and size
• Optical character recognition (OCR), optical character verification (OCV): Read (determine character identities without prior knowledge) or verify (confirm the presence of a given character sequence) a string of characters
• Bar-code reading (BCR), 2-D inspection: BCR is used to decode bar codes, while 2-D inspection decodes a new form of symbology called 2-D matrix code.