Since 2023, the popularity of generative AI has pushed artificial intelligence into the “tuyere”, and everyone has locked their development eyes on this field of industry.

As one of the important technical means of data collection, machine vision is a branch of artificial intelligence which is developing rapidly. Through the use of optical non-contact induction equipment, it automatically receives a large number of real scene image data and carries out intelligent analysis and processing, and obtains information to control the machine. Simply put, it is equipped with the eyes for the machine to perceive the outside world, so that the machine has the visual function like a human, so as to achieve a variety of detection, judgment, recognition, measurement and other functions, so it is also called the “eye of the machine”.

After years of market incubation and technology accumulation, with the continuous growth of the overall domestic economy as an opportunity, while benefiting from the downstream of various fields of policy encouragement and automation, intelligent transformation needs, machine vision industry has achieved relatively high speed growth.

Relevant data show that, driven by the rise of emerging technologies such as AI, autonomous driving and face recognition, China’s machine vision market scale will continue to maintain a high growth rate, and it is expected that in 2023 China’s machine vision market scale will reach 22.556 billion yuan.

01

Twenty year chase

China has become an important target market

As is known to the industry, the industry chain of machine vision is roughly divided into three parts: upstream parts, midstream equipment and downstream application. Upstream involves a wide range of industries, including light source, industrial lens, industrial camera, image acquisition card and software and algorithm platform, etc. The midstream is the core link of the machine vision industry chain, which is composed of visual system and visual equipment integration. Downstream for the application field, widely used in consumer electronics, automotive, semiconductor, virtual reality, intelligent security, health care and other industries.

Based on this, the global machine vision industry is in the stage of rapid development, the market size between 2010 and 2020, the annual compound growth rate of 14.47%. From the perspective of regional distribution, the European market is the largest, accounting for 36.4% of the global market. North America and Asia Pacific accounted for 29.3% and 25.3%, respectively.

Will focus on the domestic, machine vision concept since 1999 into the Chinese market, because of its development prospects and value to attract attention to promote the machine vision industry into the development stage. With Huawei security renamed Huawei Machine Vision, more machine vision to a new climax of application.

Since entering the 21st century, domestic enterprises have gradually increased independent research and development, and a number of machine vision enterprises have been born. According to relevant data, China has been following the United States, Japan after the third largest machine vision field application market, is expected to reach nearly 30 billion yuan in 2023 sales, China is gradually becoming one of the world’s most active machine vision development regions. Benefiting from the shift of global manufacturing centers to China, China will also become another important target market for international machine vision manufacturers besides Europe, North America and Japan.

02Machine vision as the power point

The road to AI security is getting wider and wider

Among many application scenarios, Safe City and City brain in the AI security industry are one of the application scenarios with more potential development of machine vision in China. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, portrait recognition technology has become an absolute hot spot in the field of public security, leading the “peace”, “Sky net” and “Xueliang” project from “filling point, filling void, filling blindness” to “filling face, filling brain, filling wisdom” transformation.

From the perspective of the market pattern, the security AI industry can be divided into four main camps: first, AI chip companies including SenseTime, MegVII, Yuncong, Yitu, Cambrian, Horizon, etc.; second, traditional security companies represented by Haedaewoo; third, Internet companies represented by Baidu, Ali, Tencent, etc. In addition, the entry of communication giants such as Huawei and Unigroup has promoted the reshuffle of the domestic machine vision industry.

AI technology itself and commercial solutions have matured in recent years, thanks to advances in computing power and large-scale data sets. “Artificial intelligence deep learning + machine vision” can help machine vision equipment quickly carry out image classification, target detection and segmentation, and has been increasingly applied in 3D machine vision, becoming one of the future mainstream development trends recognized in the industry, which also opens a new pattern for the development of AI security industry.

With the number of domestic machine vision related enterprises increasing year by year, the competition in the machine vision market is increasingly fierce. It is worth noting that the competition is no longer limited to imaging acquisition, image processing and pattern recognition, but automatically receives a large number of real scene image data, and carries out intelligent analysis and processing to assist decision-making. To be specific, traditional security equipment hardware as a breakthrough has no significant advantages, involving data acquisition, communication, processing, feedback IT system solutions are becoming a major competitive point for enterprises.