Recently, I was taken aback by several press releases claiming that Sony has apparently indicated its plan to discontinue the production of all CCD sensors by 2017.

In addition to its own algorithms, SICK will also be using the HALCON image processing library for vision sensors, 3D cameras, and vision systems in the future.

Up to now, cooperation between the two companies has been limited to 3D cameras but it will now be expanded to include various sensors in the vision sector.

In many industries, manual inspection is replaced by machine vision inspection technology for its higher speed and greater accuracy which improves product quality and reduces production costs.

Whether an automated machine vision system measures a spark plug’s gap, locates an assembly line item, reads 2D code, counts parts, checks for flaws or performs a host of other tasks, it is running at a greater speed and higher resolution than ever before.

Manufacturing has made increasing use of traditional 2-D machine vision inspection, optical character recognition (OCR) and ID reading systems, which increase quality, improve throughput and reduce costs.

Machine vision as a subset of computer science has been around for more than 20 years.