The Role of Visual Inspection in the 21 st Century

Visual inspection research has a long history spanning the 20 th century and continuing to the present day. Current efforts in multiple venues demonstrate that visual inspection continues to have a vital role for many different types of tasks in the 21 st century. The nature of this role spans the range from traditional human visual inspection to fully automated detection of defects. Consequently, today’s practitioners must not only successfully identify and apply lessons learned from the past, but also explore new areas of research in order to derive solutions for modern day issues such as those presented by introducing automation during inspection. A key lesson from past research indicates that the factors that can degrade performance will persist today, unless care is taken to design the inspection process appropriately.