The real realization of industrial automation requires highly intelligent industrial robots to replace part of human work. Obviously, if you want smart robots to replace human work well, the first thing to do is to let them "see" Only then. When industrial robots have the ability to observe things, they can judge things well, so that they can solve some problems intelligently and flexibly.
 
Therefore, machine vision, which can be measured and judged instead of the human eye, is naturally very important. The machine vision system can convert the ingested object into an image signal through a machine vision product, that is, an image capturing device, and transmit it to a dedicated image processing system to obtain The shape information of the target is converted into a digitized signal according to information such as pixel distribution, brightness, color, and the like, and then the image system performs various operations on these signals to extract the features of the target, and then controls the action of the device according to the result of the discrimination.
The machine vision industry is widely used and has four main functions: 
1. Guidance and positioning: Visual positioning requires the machine vision system to quickly and accurately find the part to be tested and confirm its position. The loading and unloading uses machine vision to locate and guide the robot arm to accurately capture. In the field of semiconductor packaging, devices need to adjust the pickup head according to the chip position information obtained by machine vision, accurately pick up the chip and bind it. This is the most basic application of visual positioning in the machine vision industry.
2, appearance inspection: testing the quality of the product on the production line, this link is also the most replaced manual. For example, in the field of medicine involved in machine vision, the main tests include size inspection, bottle appearance defect detection, bottle shoulder defect detection, bottle mouth detection and the like. 
3, high-precision detection: Some products have high precision, reaching 0.01 ~ 0.02m or even u level, the human eye can not be detected must use the machine to complete. 
4. Recognition: It is the use of machine vision to process, analyze and understand images to identify targets and objects of different modes. Data traceability and collection can be achieved, and there are many applications in auto parts, food, and medicine.
In a nutshell, the machine vision system is characterized by increased flexibility and automation, mainly in the case of dangerous work environments that are not suitable for manual work or where artificial vision is difficult to meet. Machine vision is often used instead of artificial vision. In the mass industrial production process, manual visual inspection of product quality is inefficient and the precision is not high. The machine vision inspection method can greatly improve the production efficiency and the automation degree of production. Moreover, machine vision is easy to implement information integration, and is the basic technology to realize computer integrated manufacturing.