Machine vision in Process Systems Engineering

Machine vision has been introduced to solve numerous problems in Process Systems Engineering (PSE) as well as in other discipline. In the field of PSE however, machine vision´s potentials have never been explored to the full extent yet. This is not only because the techniques involved in machine vision are still poorly-known to researchers and practitioners in PSE, but also because the characteristics of the scenes that the images acquired in process industries are often difficult to analyze due to their stochastic nature. On the other hand, data analysis has been known in PSE for several decades and extensively employed in process industries producing innumerous applications. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of methods and possible applications of machine vision from a data analysis perspective, which is more familiar to PSE community.