• Alex Savin
• April 1, 2022
• Share Now

Industrial Machine Vision – Technology Application

Defining Industrial Machine Vision

Industrial machine vision is a complex integration of optical, electronic, and sensor software into a manufacturing process. The main goal of implementing the industrial machine vision is to enhance the productivity of an enterprise and lower production costs at the same time. Safety and quality control are also belong to the most common reasons to give industrial machine vision a try.

Industrial machine vision can mean using several instruments, like video cameras, image sensors, and custom-built software, depending on the goals. The data sources for machine vision technologies are diverse too. They include images of produced items, live videos about the production process, etc.

The best part about modern industrial machine vision technology is that you are given access to the exhaustive analysis of any number of manufacturing phases. The complexity of correlations between the stages, the equipment used, and the staff responsible is no longer a problem thanks to the powerful modern AI technologies. 

Machine Vision Technologies in Practice

Industrial machine vision services cover the full lifecycle of an enterprise. In practice, it means that your business will benefit from that cooperation if you want to:

Increase in Productivity

Machine vision technologies allow you to identify manufacturing flaws early enough to tackle these flaws immediately. Machine vision in manufacturing is mostly applied to a certain production process, e.g., packaging or labeling. However, it is also possible to use a vision system for quality inspection for the whole manufacturing cycle. Increasing the productivity of your business can be as easy as ABC!

Optimize Production

The data you receive from industrial machine vision applications can be used to find the overlooked opportunities or neglected alternatives for your enterprise. No matter how quickly you produce, sell, and restock your inventory, there is still some room for perfection, isn’t there? With professional machine vision quality control, you know your business is on the right track. 

Reorganize/Rebrand Company

There are many purely technical and workload issues that can lead to the complete reorganization of your business. You can start the reorganization process with a thorough industrial quality inspection. The reliable data on workload imbalance, operation inefficiencies, etc., is what you need before you make any big decisions on changing the organizational structure of your business.

Strengthening Competitive Advantage

Industrial machine vision is one of the most effective ways to beat immediate market rivals. By detecting the irregularities in the manufacturing phases and triggering the appropriate coping mechanisms early, your enterprise can produce an item at a lower price.

How Industrial Machine Vision Works

Any successful business is a fluent concept that undergoes multiple changes. To track those changes and turn them into constructive results, you have to keep your eyes on a ball. Being realistic about the current status of your business is an absolute must for most industries. This is where industrial applications of computer vision come in handy. Reliable, impartial, and customized to your needs, these applications can illuminate the most insignificant details that influence your enterprise.

Computer Vision Guidance

Machine vision technologies can be used to boost the efficiency of your stuff and the productivity of your equipment. For instance, the machine vision quality control system can locate the items within seconds instead of manually searching for specific items on a production line. Having located the items, the system can allow the operators to choose the appropriate factor input decision, like putting a tag on the things, removing them from the production line, or packing.

You can also implement computer vision guidance to advanced sorting operations. Machine vision manufacturing allows you to adopt as many search criteria as needed. Machine learning technology can develop machine algorithms for identifying production items based on several factors, e.g., size, color, volume, etc. Once set, these algorithms can be used to create user-friendly applications for your convenience.

Damage Detection

A professional vision system for quality inspection is the most reliable way to identify damaged goods as early as possible. Machine vision technologies give you multiple opportunities for industrial quality inspection. They can help you integrate these technologies into the manufacturing cycle to perform the following tasks:

Detect the faulty items that drastically differ from the samples;

Trigger the reject mechanisms, like removing the defective item from the production line.

With that technology, you will be the first to know what major/minor aspects of your enterprise get faulty more often and – most importantly – why.

Distance Measurements

Replacing the traditional visual inspection with industrial machine vision is also very convenient to measure distances. The accuracy of industrial machine vision is much higher than a regular visual inspection.

It is also possible to use machine vision algorithms to develop the best practices for packing and storing manufactured items. What is more, industrial machine vision allows you to measure distances between parts of the manufactured items. For instance, machine vision technologies can be applied to measure the distance between a safety ring and a bottle, checking how well the bottle is closed.

Quality Inspection

As you know, the performance of a business depends not only on the number of goods your staff can produce during one working shift. This is the quality of goods that mostly determines success as a manufacturer. To ensure the highest quality possible, need to stay impartial and analyze tons of data.

There are quite a few aspects that can be inspected for quality assurance. These aspects are size, color, volume, contents, shape, length, uniformity ratio, etc. The possible mechanisms include contacting the staff responsible for the manufactured items or moving the items to the previous operation line.