Imaging using short wave infrared (SWIR) radiation has long offered interesting properties for industrial machine vision but has been slow to be adopted. SWIR offers many useful properties that can make things that are invisible under white light become visible, as well as making opaque objects under white light transparent. This can allow machine vision lenses to see into objects they otherwise could not, increasing contrast between objects that otherwise look very similar. But despite these advantages, the adoption of SWIR has been very slow.
Recent breakthroughs in sensor technologies have shown, however, great promise in SWIR moving into the mainstream of machine vision. These new breakthroughs have resulted in new imaging sensors covering visible and SWIR wavelengths with a high quantum efficiency (QE), which describes how efficiently incident light is converted to electric signals. High sensitivity to both visible and SWIR wavelengths is something that has garnered a lot of interest and discussion already, but the other attributes of the sensor are also very interesting and important for their adoption in industrial machine vision and inspection.