Machine vision realizes the counter-war: "Industrial Eye" is expected to run through the entire artificial intelligence industry chain

In recent years, the layout of well-known foreign giants in the machine vision industry has been particularly rapid. Apple acquired Tuplejump, an Indian machine vision company; Intel acquired Itseez, a Russian computer vision company, for unmanned driving; and even Amazon acquired a top European machine vision team for research in the field of drones. Why do many well-known international giants work together to focus on the machine vision industry? Let's understand!

Broad prospects for machine vision applications

Once upon a time, machine vision, which was originally a technology with robots, was once rejected because of its low recognition accuracy. Some customers even think that machine vision is not as accurate as manual, but it costs more than manual, which is really not a necessary thing.

However, forty years of feng shui took turns.

Today, machine vision technology has not only been successfully applied to many other fields, but also the scope of application is gradually expanding. From the initial electronics manufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing companies, it has developed into packaging, automotive, transportation, and printing industries.

With the emergence of new technologies in the science and technology industry, new windows in the application field of machine vision are still being opened one by one. From industrial robots, security monitoring and industrial inspection to virtual reality, self-driving cars, robots, smart cities, and the Internet of Things, the presence of machine vision in the application field is increasing. This makes machine vision technology not only return to the advanced level of keeping pace with robots, but also becomes a core key technology. The accelerated deployment of global Internet giants is undoubtedly a fancy to the industry's infinite and broad application prospects.

In fact, from today's perspective, machine vision undoubtedly plays a very important role. Especially in intelligent production lines and intelligent equipment, machine vision can not only make the quality of products in the automated production process more stable and more efficient. It can also greatly improve the flexibility and efficiency of production. Especially in some dangerous working environments that are not suitable for manual operations and mass repetitive industrial production processes, machine vision can not only ensure personal safety, but also greatly improve production efficiency.

There are no leading companies in the country to speed up

Benefiting from the warming of industrial robots, the development and application of machine vision in my country has also ushered in new growth in industrial production lines. In 2016, China's machine vision market totaled 3.8 billion yuan, with a compound growth rate of 26.6% in the past five years. With the vigorous development of China's manufacturing industry, the machine vision industry has also passed the initial period of development in the Chinese market. Not only have international well-known brands set up their businesses in China, but Chinese local companies have also joined this field.

On February 13, China's leading surveillance product company Hikvision announced that it would establish a research and development center in Montreal and a research institute in Silicon Valley, demonstrating its determination to actively deploy in the "machine vision" business area; April 13, Baidu Announced a wholly-owned acquisition of xPerception, a technology company that has been focusing on machine vision software and hardware solutions; on May 22, machine vision technology company Weijing Intelligent in the field of industrial automation completed a 50 million yuan A round of financing.

However, unlike foreign countries, domestic machine vision manufacturers have no leading companies with obvious advantages. With increasing demand but the competitive landscape has not yet formed, who can expand rapidly and who will be the giants of tomorrow is still worth looking forward to.

Obviously, after decades of rapid economic development, China's economy has completed a leap from nothing to something, from impossible to possible in many fields, and now it has reached the stage of improving production efficiency and product quality and brutal competition. Many previously used manual processes are gradually being replaced by machines, which has created more and more demands on machine vision systems.

Compared with human eye observation, machine vision has the characteristics of automation, objectivity, non-contact and high precision. More importantly, the machine vision system has part of the functions of the human brain, which can extract information from the image of objective things, process and understand it, and finally use it for actual detection, measurement and control.

Explosive growth is an opportunity and a challenge

At present, the domestic market's application demand in several fields such as motion control, production line, diagnosis, testing, and numerical control equipment is growing rapidly. At the same time, the scale of China's 3C electronics market is leading the world, and the application opportunities for machine vision products are gradually increasing.

However, with the further in-depth research of machine vision software, the technical requirements are getting higher and higher. Currently, machine vision systems on the market are difficult to meet industry needs due to the difficulties of development, use, and sales.

Therefore, for many domestic manufacturers, how to have core technology, build brand advantages, and discover and train talents in a limited time is not only a difficult subjective problem, but also an applied problem that must be solved. Faced with the advanced technology and market competition of foreign companies, how should domestic manufacturers and companies grasp the current opportunities and challenges? We also expect them to hand over a satisfactory answer.