Computational imaging technology has found its way into industrial automated inspection, where the creative use of illumination components has emerged as an enabling technology providing valuable imaging capabilities.

While COVID dampened demand early on, the skills gap and labor shortage that has plagued the industry for more than a decade is still in full swing. As new NDT methods advance, quality professionals require new training, and technicians transitioning from film techniques to non-film techniques need hands-on experience.

In the fall of 2021, COVID-19 was a top concern for more than half of respondents in our September 2021 survey. Today that number is down to 17%, according to our Annual Quality Spending Survey, which surveyed subscribers in September 2022.

The topic of Quality 4.0 is rapidly becoming a legend due to its mysterious nature; it seemingly has no formal description. Very few people can confidently say that they have seen it or used it. 

As the field of machine vision grows, it becomes increasingly important to understand what makes a machine vision system work well.

Multidimensionality has a specific definition, but like many other words, the definition shifts, or is tweaked, depending on the subject being spoken of and its context.

Quality is not a single field, but in fact the integration of knowledge from many fields of science, technology and management. This can be seen by looking at some of the quality gurus and their more well-known contributions.

Recently I had a discussion with a quality manager concerning the focus of quality and what skills are important to success. It centered on the degree of focus which should be placed on the quality tools versus people and teams.

The Resonance Acoustic Method (RAM) is a long-standing nondestructive test (NDT) that measures the structural responses of a part. These responses are a set of unique and measurable natural frequency (resonance) data.

As surface finish measurement increasingly moves to the point of manufacture, adding automation to the process helps maximize productivity and increases quality and machining efficiency.