Trends and developments in industrial machine vision: 2013

When following current advancements and implementations in the field of machine vision there seems to be no borders for future developments: Calculating power constantly increases, and new ideas are spreading and previously challenging approaches are introduced in to mass market. Within the past decades these advances have had dramatic impacts on our lives. Consumer electronics, e.g. computers or telephones, which once occupied large volumes, now fit in the palm of a hand. To note just a few examples e.g. face recognition was adopted by the consumer market, 3D capturing became cheap, due to the huge community SW-coding got easier using sophisticated development platforms. However, still there is a remaining gap between consumer and industrial applications. While the first ones have to be entertaining, the second have to be reliable. Recent studies (e.g. VDMA [1], Germany) show a moderately increasing market for machine vision in industry. Asking industry regarding their needs the main challenges for industrial machine vision are simple usage and reliability for the process, quick support, full automation, self/easy adjustment at changing process parameters, "forget it in the line". Furthermore a big challenge is to support quality control: Nowadays the operator has to accurately define the tested features for checking the probes. There is an upcoming development also to let automated machine vision applications find out essential parameters in a more abstract level (top down). In this work we focus on three current and future topics for industrial machine vision: Metrology supporting automation, quality control (inline/atline/offline) as well as visualization and analysis of datasets with steadily growing sizes. Finally the general trend of the pixel orientated towards object orientated evaluation is addressed. We do not directly address the field of robotics taking advances from machine vision. This is actually a fast changing area which is worth an own contribution.