In the past 60 years, artificial intelligence has changed all aspects of life, among which deep learning algorithms can be said to have contributed greatly, and machine vision, known as the "eye of industry", has also benefited from the improvement of this algorithm, and is a rapidly developing branch of artificial intelligence, which is expected to become the next new outlet for science and technology.

Looking at the international market, there are many giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon, among which Apple has acquired Perceptio, Turi and Tuplejump since the end of last year, and the activities are very frequent.

The darling of the post-economic crisis era

Looking back on the development process of machine vision in China, it can be roughly divided into three stages: First, in the embryonic period from the early 90s of the 20th century to 2006, some engineers from research institutions established vision companies and began to do some basic image processing and analysis work. Secondly, in the start-up period from 2006 to 2009, the promotion of deep learning algorithms increased the accuracy of image recognition to 90%, and the customer base expanded to OEM equipment manufacturers and some large food and beverage enterprises with quality inspection and monitoring related needs. After the economic crisis, domestic OEM equipment manufacturers, SI, and accessories manufacturers have come with opportunities, and their performance has increased significantly. Therefore, since 2009, it has been a period of rapid growth of machine vision.

Figure 1: The development stage of the machine vision industry

From the perspective of market size, due to the late start of China's machine vision industry, the overall market base before 2009 was small, after 2009 began to enter a period of rapid development, benefiting from the growth of demand in many industries such as electronic manufacturing, municipal transportation, automobiles, food and packaging machinery, as well as the growth brought about by endogenous recovery in the post-economic crisis era, the industry achieved 48% rapid growth in 2010. By 2015, the scale of China's machine vision market has reached 2.2 billion yuan, accounting for 8.3% of the world's total, of which semiconductors and electronic manufacturing fields account for half of the industry (46.4%). During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, driven by the Made in China 2025 policy, the growth rate of China's machine vision market is expected to remain at about 20%.

Figure 2: Market size of China's machine vision industry from 2013 to 2020 (unit: million yuan)

Source: Shuiqing Muhua Research Center

There are still three main driving factors for the market in the future

According to the analysis, the advent of the era of intelligent manufacturing is a great development opportunity for the industry, and there are still three major driving factors for the development of the industry in the future: broad downstream demand, cost savings and technological progress.

The application demand space is wide

The use in manufacturing and other fields is constantly expanding, which has led to an increase in the demand for machine vision. The wide range of applications also determines that machine vision will gradually develop in the direction of openness from the simple collection, analysis, and transmission of data and judgment of actions in the past, which also indicates that machine vision will be further integrated with automation. Although the manufacturing industry is susceptible to the deterioration of the economic environment, machine vision is increasingly used in other fields such as transportation and security.

Cost savings drive

Labor costs are rising, and machine vision applications can effectively reduce costs. With the maturity of modern industrial automation technology, more and more manufacturing companies are considering how to use machine vision to help production lines achieve functions such as inspection, measurement and automatic identification, so as to improve efficiency and reduce costs, so as to maximize production benefits.

Technology-driven

Machine vision systems are made up of a variety of technologies, so they require expertise in multiple areas. The development of vision systems needs to focus on hardware, software, and their cross-border integration to provide cost-effective and reliable solutions for the end user. Over the past few years, with continued advancements in areas such as imaging systems, lighting systems, processors, and more, their costs have been decreasing, while their size has become smaller and smaller. Thanks to innovations in the field of machine vision, as well as the integration of advanced image processing algorithms, world systems are being used in more areas of industrial automation.