Digital Images – The Bread and Butter of Computer Vision

This chapter focuses on the usage of Computer Vision (CV) in manufacturing for product inspection, quality assurance, workplace safety, and factory automation through robotic vision. This is of specific importance to BMW Group’s Logistics department to automate the process and ensure the quality of items delivered to the supply chain, and from the supply chain to the manufacturing plant. This chapter briefly describes how digital images are represented and prepare for processing by CV solutions. It also highlights the need for synthetic images to train Deep Learning (DL) CV models, and describes existing real and synthetic CV image datasets. This chapter attempts to answer the following questions: How are digital images represented? What is the difference between feature-based and DL-based CV solutions? Why is there a growing need for synthetic digital images in industry?