Materials are designed to withstand the environment and stress to which they will be subjected. The properties of a material or component involve not only the elemental composition but manufacturing processes such as heat treatment and machining processes.
Over the years, manufacturers of all types of products have deployed literally thousands of machine vision systems for applications such as assembly verification, gaging and motion guidance.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then nondestructive testing (NDT) would be among her favorite progeny, at least with the design engineers and manufacturing sect.