A new way to look at the machine vision industry

One of the auto companies has a lane departure warning system that works by looking back at where you’ve come from. I find a lot of machine vision market surveys and projections are pretty similar: they seem predicated on the idea that the current trend will continue. And in the case of the AIA’s surveys and reports, they segment the vision industry in ways that don’t make a lot of sense to me.

As reported in Electronic Products (June 24^th, 2013,) Yole Développement (sic) has taken a different approach. You should read “Total industrial machine vision sales expected to reach $2B in 2018” for details, but in essence, they’ve created a matrix that seems to encapsulate what various sub-markets need.

So one axis spans the extent to which the user needs to customize a system, the other covers “Sharpness of detail/total Field of View.” I’m not sure that last heading is quite right, but it does a better job of defining what machine vision users need than do terms like “Application Specific Machine Vision”.

I think it’s an interesting, and useful, way to look at our industry.

Incidentally, most of the future growth is seen as coming from the non-industrial segments. Industrial machine vision technology is described as “mature” resulting in more price competition and with consolidation predicted.

Let’s see if that turns out to be correct.