Untiring eyes [machine vision systems]

The authors look at why and how vision systems have grown from a rarity to play an increasingly central role in a vast range of manufacturing operations. A machine vision system is usually made up of a means of capturing an image (a TV camera or similar device), means of digitising and storing the resulting image, and a processing system which will automatically, without human intervention or judgment, make a measurement, a logical decision or a classification operation on the content of the image. Industrial inspection using automated image analysis is most commonly called automated visual inspection (AVI)