Clever Cameras Do More Than See

Hank Hogan, Contributing Editor

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes what's needed are just a few: good, bad, accept, reject. In manufacturing, product assessment is often based on visual data. A human then processes that data many times to form a quality judgment.

However, that is changing. The steady drop in computing cost has enabled a host of vendors to create cameras that do more than see. They digest data and spit out analyzed results, thanks to onboard processors and memory. Called "smart cameras," these devices are fundamentally different from their less intelligent brethren...