In line with Industry 4.0 objectives, many manufacturers strive to streamline their processes to quickly produce consistently superior products.

Part 1 of this three-part series examined how to identify characteristics of the object and the background you can use to create contrast with the illumination source for your machine vision application. This second part looks at how you go about choosing a light source to take advantage of the characteristics that create contrast. 

Imaging lenses enable machine vision systems to inspect, sort, and measure objects for a variety of applications including manufacturing, robotics, autonomous (self-driving) vehicles, and more. 

The use of machine vision in industrial automation applications continues to increase as companies look for gains in productivity, efficiency and safety. Market forecasters estimate that the total market for machine vision will reach more than $18 billion by 2025, up from about $10 billion today.