Special Section on Quality Control by Artificial Vision

摘要

In all areas of science and engineering, applied researchers shoulder a tremendous responsibility, in that, through their work, they demonstrate the discipline's relevance to the betterment of humankind's quality and quantity of life. It is well understood that failure to do so successfully will inevitably lead to the demise of the discipline. Machine or artificial vision is a sub-discipline of computer vision that deals with its application in industrial settings. In machine vision, researchers draw from fundamental advances in a multitude of fields, such as sensors, optics, photometry, image processing, pattern recognition, and specialized hardware implementation to conceive complex systems that address ever so complicated problems in product characterization and quality control. Owing to advances made in each of the aforementioned fields in the past two decades, machine-vision methodologies have enjoyed a great deal of attention in as many years. Indeed, today it is nearly impossible to imagine industrial settings, such as the semiconductor or automotive industries, without the footprint of vision-based inspection systems. Of course, as we all know, many challenges still remain that require fundamental contributions from the community of machine-vision researchers.