The cell phone industry has been the single largest driver of new CMOS image sensor technology for the past ten years—smaller pixels, higher sensitivity, and lower noise—all in a bid to decrease sensor cost and capture ever higher quality still and video imagery for human consumption. The size of the cell phone market has enabled the tremendous investment in the fabrication technologies required to achieve these advances. Smaller, adjacent markets like machine vision and medical imaging have taken advantage of this massive technology investment by re-using the same technologies. The recent proliferation of Global Shutter image sensors targeted to machine vision applications is a prime example of such technology leverage.

The mobile market continues to grow and will keep driving new technology development. However, the next phase of growth in imaging products will increasingly come from new high volume applications such as automotive, virtual/augmented reality, and life sciences. These new applications rely on non-traditional imaging modalities such as 3D vision, thermal infrared imaging, and sensitivity beyond the visible. The investment in these new imaging technologies will rival the investments made during the past 15 years for cell phone image capture. And once again, the machine vision industry will seek out opportunities to leverage these new technologies for industrial applications. By recognizing these new consumer applications and the technologies that they will drive, we can gather insights about what lies ahead in machine vision.