You may not have already heard of Machine vision systems, however they are currently widely used in manufacture, and any other industry that requires accuracy and reliability. If your business relies on consistent quality control – which in most cases is traditionally undertaken by a human inspector – you may well have already heard about machine vision technology.
The various technologies that go into creating a good machine vision system can be highly complex, however they bring many benefits to the industry and we are going to talk about them in this post.
What are machine vision systems suitable for?
- Sorting food
- Packaging inspections
- Reading bar codes
- Verifying data codes
- Automotive construction
- Engine part inspection
- Label inspection on products
- Checking medical and other devices for defects
- Checking engineering components
What are the benefits of using machine vision in your industry sector?
- They can improve the quality of your products, by refining inspection, measurement, gauging and assembly processes
- Productivity will increase as a result of machine vision as repetitive tasks that were formerly done manually are now done by the machine vision systems
- Production costs will decrease as instead of many people working on a production line, they are replaced by one vision system. They will also be decreased due to flaws being detected much earlier in the process.
- Following on from this, the scrap rate is reduced due to the inspection, measurement and gauging of the machine vision system.
- Another advantage is the reduced floor space needed as the machine vision system will take up less space than multiple manual operators.
- There are lower capital equipment costs as adding vision to a machine improves its performance and avoids obsolescence.
- There is now more complete information and tighter process control as manual tasks can now provide computer data feedback.
- Less machine downtime and reduced set up time as change overs are programmed in advance when using machine vision systems.
- Inventory control due to optical character recognition and identification. You can find out more about this on this website.
- Production flexibility due to measurement and gauging, robot guidance and prior operation verification.
- It simplifies product marketing and assists in accurate sales forecasts.
- In the healthcare industry, machine vision systems help to easily identify the high risk patients, make near perfect diagnosis, recommend the best possible medicines for the patient and predict any possible readmissions.
- Avoids data duplication and inaccuracy in records during the data entry process.
- Machine vision systems also have a significant impact on the finance sector as some of the common benefits in finance include portfolio management, algorithmic trading, loan underwriting and most important fraud detection. Machine vision also facilitates continual data assessments for detecting and analysing anomalies and nuances in finance.
- Manufacturing firms can also really benefit from machine vision as they help in the creation of highly efficient predictive maintenance plans. Following such predictive maintenance plans will minimise the chances of unexpected failures, thereby reducing unnecessary preventive maintenance activities.
- 3D Imaging has become very popular today and a big advantage of using machine vision is that it works independently of the object’s texture and results in high 3D reconstruction quality.
