The term machine vision refers to the ability of machines to visually perceive their environment. A typical setting consists of a camera for capturing the images, a cable which links the camera to a PC, and the PC which does the image processing.
The main advantage of such a setup is its simplicity. The plug-and-play components are connected via a standard interface (such as USB, GigE) and use standard protocols (USB3 Vision, GigE Vision). Since they work with a standard operating system such as Windows, the developer can quickly and efficiently create additional software using commercial image processing libraries.