The term "machine vision" is mainly used in highly controlled, narrow industrial applications, think factory assembly lines, steel inspection, monitoring for cracks in materials, shape or size classification of items, etc. The task is usually very well defined, and the same thing needs to be repeated under essentially the same conditions over and over again with high reliability.
But many other things exist outside the "glue some GPT4o vision api stuff together for a mobile app to pitch to VCs" space. Like inspecting and servicing airplanes (Airbus has vision engineers who make tools for internal use, you don't have datasets of a billion images for that). There are also things like 3D motion capture of animals, such as mice or even insects like flies, which requires very precise calibration and proper optical setups. Or estimating the meat yield of pigs and cows on farms from multi-view images combined with weight measurements. There are medical things, like cell counting, 3D reconstruction of facial geometry for plastic surgery, dentistry applications, and a million other things other than chatting with ChatGPT about images or classifying cats vs dogs or drawing bounding boxes of people in a smartphone video.
The term "machine vision" is mainly used in highly controlled, narrow industrial applications, think factory assembly lines, steel inspection, monitoring for cracks in materials, shape or size classification of items, etc. The task is usually very well defined, and the same thing needs to be repeated under essentially the same conditions over and over again with high reliability.
But many other things exist outside the "glue some GPT4o vision api stuff together for a mobile app to pitch to VCs" space. Like inspecting and servicing airplanes (Airbus has vision engineers who make tools for internal use, you don't have datasets of a billion images for that). There are also things like 3D motion capture of animals, such as mice or even insects like flies, which requires very precise calibration and proper optical setups. Or estimating the meat yield of pigs and cows on farms from multi-view images combined with weight measurements. There are medical things, like cell counting, 3D reconstruction of facial geometry for plastic surgery, dentistry applications, and a million other things other than chatting with ChatGPT about images or classifying cats vs dogs or drawing bounding boxes of people in a smartphone video.