Sunday, November 20, 2011

Outlook for the machine vision industry


With all the negativity the US media likes to force upon us (nattering nabobs, anyone?) it’s good to hear some more objective views. The latest cautiously optimistic report comes from optics.org in an article somewhat misleadingly titled, “Machine vision groups spark Asian expansion”.

Based on comments from Dr. Munkelt of MVTec and supported by data, (imagine that!) this tells us that growth should continue – albeit at a lower rate than previously – throughout next year.

That’s good news, but I do see an issue (or an opportunity): I think growth is going to be rather incremental, based on engineers using vision as a tool to solve manufacturing problems, unless there’s some technology breakthrough. In my humble opinion, what we need for accelerated growth is something that makes machine vision more robust and very much easier to deploy. Increased resolutions and higher speeds are all useful and will make those niche applications feasible, but if we could have a “magic” system with better-than-human capabilities I think the vision market would explode.

What are you working on?

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