Although this distinction is not universally accepted, there is a clearly definable corpus of researchers who study the application of vision and AI technologies to industrial inspection, measurement, monitoring and control tasks and for whom the conceptual separation of these subjects is essential.
Machine vision requires a multi-disciplinary approach to design for it to be successful.
Image Processing is just one element in an industrial machine vision system - it is not the most important one. Industrial machine vision systems have much to offer in improving product quality, product safety, process safety and process efficiency. However, they are highly complex and experience has consistently shown that their successful application is critically dependent upon good engineering design, applied to all parts of the system and integrated so that they operate together in an harmonious manner. In order to avoid using inappropriate and impractical techniques, it is essential that we acknowledge and emphasise the engineering dimension. One of the problems that frequently arises when Computer Vision specialists attempt to apply their knowledge to Industrial Machine Vision tasks is that there is a tendency to rely on clever software and algorithmic methods to overcome shortcomings in the remainder of the system.