Optical technology brings powerful capability to a wide range of problems. Imagine, for example, that you hold a blank piece of white paper up to the night sky. By measuring the intensity of light on that paper you could computationally reconstruct the image of all the light sources that created the intensity pattern. That type of problem is called the inverse problem, and it’s notoriously difficult to solve. But you can solve it simply by putting a lens in front of the piece of paper, which creates an image of the stars above.
Optical systems bring the same kind of convenience and power to other applications. A component measurement that would require eight different caliper measurements can be replaced with a single image. Alignment issues that would otherwise require a complicated measurement structure can be solved with a laser and a few simple optics. Visual inspection of product size, quantity, or fill level can be performed by a ruggedized camera and straightforward image processing software.