Vision inspection plays an instrumental role in factory automation. In the past, manufacturers struggled between relying either on a team of operators to manually inspect parts for defects or on an expensive early generation automated vision system.
On the one hand, manual inspection could never match the accuracy of an automated vision system. Inspection operators would get tired and inspection quality gradually suffered further into their shifts. On the other hand, an early vision system was expensive and did not have the hardware capabilities to handle the more complex algorithms that were required. The industry has changed a lot since then, as vision hardware and software capabilities have improved dramatically while equipment cost has lowered to the point where it now makes sense to automate visual inspection.
