Today, automation technology is developing rapidly in China, and people's understanding of machine vision has deepened, leading to a significant shift in their perceptions. Machine vision systems have increased the level of automation in production, making hazardous working environments unsuitable for manual labor possible, and enabling large-scale, continuous production, thus greatly improving production efficiency and product precision. The ability to quickly acquire and automatically process information also facilitates information integration in industrial production. As machine vision technology matures and develops, its applications are becoming increasingly widespread. Based on these areas, we can roughly summarize five typical applications of machine vision in industry, which essentially outline the role that machine vision technology plays in industrial production.
Image recognition applications.
Image recognition utilizes machine vision to process, analyze, and understand images in order to identify targets and objects of various patterns. The most typical application of image recognition in the industrial field of machine vision is QR code recognition, the most common type of barcode we see every day. Large amounts of data are stored in these small QR codes, enabling product tracking and management. Machine vision systems can easily recognize and read barcodes on various material surfaces, greatly improving the efficiency of modern production.
Image detection applications
Inspection is one of the most important applications of machine vision in the industrial field. Almost all products require inspection, but manual inspection has many drawbacks. Manual inspection has low accuracy, which becomes even more difficult to guarantee over long periods of work, and its slow speed can easily affect the efficiency of the entire production process. Therefore, machine vision is also widely used in image inspection, such as: detecting characters on the edge of coins. In the fifth set of RMB banknotes issued in October 2000, the one-yuan coin had enhanced anti-counterfeiting features on its side. Due to the strict control requirements of the production process, a visual inspection system was installed in the final stage of coin minting; color registration and color matching checks in the printing process; printing quality checks on beverage bottle caps in the packaging process; barcode and character recognition on product packaging; and defect detection in glass bottles. Machine vision systems for defect detection in glass bottles also include pharmaceutical glass bottles, meaning that machine vision has also entered the pharmaceutical field. Its main inspections include dimensional inspection, bottle body appearance defect detection, bottle shoulder defect detection, and bottle mouth inspection.
Visual positioning applications
Visual positioning requires machine vision systems to quickly and accurately locate and confirm the position of the part being measured. In the semiconductor packaging field, equipment needs to adjust the pick-up head based on the chip position information obtained by machine vision to accurately pick up and bind the chip. This is the most basic application of visual positioning in the machine vision industry.
Object measurement applications
The most significant characteristic of machine vision in industrial applications is its non-contact measurement technology. It offers the same high precision and speed, but without the wear and tear of contact measurement, eliminating the potential for secondary damage caused by physical contact. Common applications include gear, connector, automotive parts, IC component pins, twist drills, and thread inspection.
Object sorting applications
In practice, object sorting applications follow the identification and detection process. Machine vision systems process images to achieve sorting. In industrial applications, machine vision is commonly used for food sorting, automated sorting of parts with surface defects, and cotton fiber sorting.
