The semiconductor and electronics industries remain the largest consumers of North American machine vision systems, but food and transportation are also key markets, according to a study that the Automated Imaging Association released at the 1997 Robots and Vision show in April.
North America's machine vision market grew by 13.5 percent in 1996, reaching $1.35 billion, the report said. These revenues follow a 54 percent revenue growth in 1995. Based on capital investment expansion and industry needs for productivity and quality improvements, the report predicts that machine vision revenues will break the $2 billion mark by the year 2000.