Our staff have first-hand experience in Machine Vision that spans more than over a decade. We distinguish between Image Processing techniques and Machine Vision.

 Image Processing is essentially a series of (often very complex and powerful) techniques that enhance or otherwise manipulate an image, yielding as a result another viewable image.

Machine Vision can, on the other hand, be defined as a series of techniques which, when applied to an image, yield an " answer ", in the form of a small set of numbers. These which can then be fed into some other automatic component to perform specific tasks: no further human intervention is required.

In this framework it is self-evident that Image Processing can and very often will, find its place (usually in the first stages of the process) in conditioning the raw image to make it suitable for further processing.

This processing can be as simple as pixel counting or, much more likely, can involve complex computations depending on the nature of the problem at hand.

We can divide the generial field of Machine Vision into several related but well separated, sub-fields.