Applied Machine Vision and IoT

This chapter analyzes and discusses to what extent machine vision is applicable and can benefit Internet of Things (IoT), wherein computing capability is extended to a variety of objects, devices, and sensors. It presents the fundamentals of machine vision and then proceeds to look at current trends in machine vision research and development. The chapter then looks at deep learning in the machine vision context. Given that transfer learning can generate a model for each specific task, a generic deep learning framework for improved situation awareness can be defined as part of an IoT system, where every phase of the framework should be accomplished by an element of the IoT infrastructure. The chapter finally describes three IoT use cases for machine vision technology and describes the challenges of sensing critical infrastructures, like power plants or oil pipelines, using drones, thus exploiting the latest advances in Machine Vision.