Machine vision uses computers to simulate human visual functions, enabling machines to acquire and understand relevant visual information. It can be divided into two principles: "vision" and "perception."
"Vision" involves displaying external information as digital signals through imaging and feeding them back to the computer. This requires a complete hardware solution, including light sources, cameras, image acquisition cards, and vision sensors. "Perception," on the other hand, involves the computer processing and analyzing these digital signals, primarily through software algorithms.
The global machine vision market is mainly distributed in North America, Europe, Japan, and China. According to statistics, the global market size for machine vision systems and components was US$3.67 billion in 2014, US$4.2 billion in 2015, and US$6.2 billion in 2016. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the market from 2002 to 2016 was approximately 12%. Machine vision system integration, based on North American market data, is estimated to be about six times the size of the vision systems and components market.
China's machine vision industry started with the introduction of technology in the 1980s. With the introduction of complete production lines in semiconductor factories in 1998, machine vision systems were also introduced. Before 2006, domestic machine vision products were mainly concentrated in foreign-funded manufacturing enterprises, and the scale of these enterprises was relatively small.
Starting in 2006 , the customer base for industrial machine vision applications began to expand to the inspection fields of printing, food, etc. The market began to grow rapidly in 2011. With the increase in labor costs and the demand for upgrading in the manufacturing industry, coupled with the rapid development of computer vision technology, more and more machine vision solutions have penetrated into various fields. By 2016, the scale of China's machine vision market had reached nearly 7 billion yuan.
In machine vision, defect detection is one of the most widely used functions, primarily detecting various information on the surface of a product. In modern industrial automated production, each process in continuous mass production has a certain defect rate. Although these rates may seem small individually, when multiplied, they become a bottleneck for companies to improve yield. Furthermore, removing defective products after the entire process is completed significantly increases costs.
For example, if there is a positioning deviation in the solder paste printing process, and the problem is not discovered until the online testing after chip mounting, the cost of rework will be more than 100 times the original cost. Therefore, timely detection and rejection of defective products are very important for quality control and cost control, and are also an important cornerstone for the further upgrading of the manufacturing industry.
In the inspection industry, machine vision has significant advantages over human vision.
1 ) High precision: Human vision has 64 gray levels and weak ability to distinguish small targets; machine vision can significantly improve the gray level and can observe targets at the micrometer level.
2 ) High speed: Humans cannot see fast-moving targets clearly, while machine shutter speeds can reach the microsecond level;
3 ) High stability: Machine vision solves a very serious problem for humans: instability. Manual visual inspection is a very tedious and arduous job, and no matter what reward or punishment system you design, a relatively high rate of missed detections will occur. However, machine vision inspection equipment does not have fatigue issues or emotional fluctuations. As long as you write something in the algorithm, it will execute it diligently every time. This greatly improves the controllability of results in quality control.
4 ) Information integration and retention: The amount of information obtained by machine vision is comprehensive and traceable, and relevant information can be easily integrated and retained.
KINEYE® 3D Machine Vision, comparable to world-class technology.
The KINEYE® 3D machine vision system, jointly developed by Yuyang and European research institutions, boasts world-class technology and can restructure and recreate manufacturing production lines, enabling enterprises to upgrade and transform intelligently. It identifies, measures, and inspects products during production and distribution, ensuring their quality.
Moreover, KINEYE® 3D machine vision has been successfully implemented in a well-known domestic enterprise. This great achievement demonstrates Yuyang's strong R&D and innovation capabilities and opens up a "new vision" for industrial automation in my country.
1 ) Material basket grabbing
The KINEYE® 3D machine vision system can identify disordered targets and objects, accurately acquire workpiece position information, and enable robots or robotic arms to precisely position and quickly grasp objects. This system can be widely used in material handling, assembly, shelving, and unshelving on various production lines.
2 ) Motion grasping
The KINEYE® 3D machine vision system uses state-of-the-art 3D vision positioning technology. Based on the three-dimensional feature information of the workpiece, it can accurately locate and grasp moving targets on a track in highly automated manufacturing processes without requiring the target to stop.
3 ) Guiding the robot to polish
The robot is equipped with a 3D vision system, which uses 3D machine vision to process, analyze and understand images to identify targets and objects of various patterns, thereby guiding the polishing robot to complete the polishing operation on the target object.
4 ) Appearance inspection
Thanks to its binocular simulated human eye design, KINEYE® 3D machine vision can easily complete spatial level inspection, that is, accurate measurement of complex product dimensions and defects. It can not only completely replace manual labor, but is also more accurate and efficient.
