Several critical components need to come together to form a machine vision system. This includes the sensor (typically within a camera) that captures a picture for inspection, the processing hardware (a PC or vision appliance) and software algorithms to render and communicate the results. In addition, lighting, staging, and lenses are required to set up a machine vision system.

In today’s manufacturing environment, automatic vision inspection has been widely applied in many different industries including semiconductor, electronics, food and beverage, pharmaceutical packaging, automotive, and many others.

In some instances, optical inspection can refer to human visual inspection of an object, but these days it more likely refers to Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) conducted by a machine vision system or specialized AOI system.