Algorithmic amplification is the process by which automated ranking and recommendation systems on digital platforms increase the visibility of certain content beyond its initial audience. Major platforms including Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) use such systems to determine what appears in users' feeds and search results. The term is used in research on social media and digital media regulation to describe how platform design choices influence the distribution of online information. Unlike chronological feeds, algorithmic systems evaluate content using signals such as engagement rates, viewing duration, and predicted relevance to individual users. Content that performs strongly on these metrics may be promoted to progressively larger audiences through feeds, search rankings, or autoplay systems. The process is distinct from content moderation, which involves removing, labelling, or restricting content under platform rules, although the two can interact in practice. The concept is closely connected to the attention economy. Research has linked algorithmic amplification to the spread of misinformation and the circulation of political content, as well as to effects on young users' mental health. The scale and direction of those effects remain debated, in part because independent researchers have limited access to the internal workings of platform recommendation systems. Governments in the European Union, United Kingdom, United States, and China have pursued differing regulatory approaches to recommendation algorithms. The EU's Digital Services Act and the UK's Online Safety Act 2023 impose obligations on large platforms related to recommendation system transparency and risk, while China became the first country to enact binding legislation specifically targeting such systems. Internal documents and whistleblower testimony reported by the BBC in 2026 described how competitive pressure between Meta and TikTok led to trade-offs between engagement and user safety in the design of their recommendation systems. == Terminology == The term algorithmic amplification is used in media studies, platform governance scholarship and regulatory literature to describe how automated systems influence the distribution of content beyond what organic user sharing alone would produce. It is distinct from viral spread, which refers primarily to user-driven sharing behaviour, and from algorithmic bias, which describes systematic errors or unfairness in algorithmic outputs. The related term algorithmic curation is used for the broader process of selecting and ordering content, of which amplification is one possible outcome. The phrase also appears in regulatory and legislative discussion of recommendation systems. The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) identifies recommendation systems as a potential source of systemic risk, and the term appears frequently in academic and policy commentary on the regulation. In the United States, proposals including the Filter Bubble Transparency Act and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) have used it to frame requirements around recommendation system transparency. In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee used the term in a 2025 report on how recommendation algorithms contributed to the spread of misinformation during the 2024 Southport riots. A Joint Declaration on AI and Freedom of Expression adopted in October 2025 by four international freedom of expression mandate holders, including the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, stated that recommender systems and other AI-powered curation tools exert "a large hidden influence and gatekeeper role" over what information people access and consume. == Background == Early internet platforms typically displayed content in reverse-chronological order or through keyword-based search systems. Although the term is most often applied to social media, the underlying logic predates social media itself. A 2021 overview traced the origins of modern recommendation systems to the early 1990s, when they were first used experimentally for personal email and information filtering. The 1992 Tapestry mail system and the 1994 GroupLens news filtering system were early milestones before recommendation systems spread into e-commerce and other online services. As user bases and content volumes grew during the 2000s, major platforms including Google, YouTube, and Facebook developed machine-learning systems to personalise content delivery and prioritise material predicted to generate engagement. Facebook introduced its News Feed in 2006, which gradually shifted from chronological presentation towards algorithmically ranked content. YouTube altered its recommendation system in 2012 to prioritise watch time rather than clicks, a change the platform said was prompted by concerns that click-based metrics encouraged misleading thumbnails and low-quality videos. TikTok, launched internationally in 2018, adopted a model in which its primary content surface, the For You feed, is driven almost entirely by algorithmic recommendation rather than by a user's social graph. An internal document obtained by The New York Times in 2021 showed that the platform's algorithm optimised for retention and time spent, using signals such as watch duration, replays, likes, and comments to score and rank videos. Algorithmic recommendation also became central to platforms outside social media. Spotify's personalised features, including Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Home recommendations, use behavioural signals and inferred "taste profiles" to surface tracks and artists beyond a listener's existing library. An ethnographic study of music curators at streaming platforms described this blend of algorithmic and human editorial selection as an "algo-torial" model of gatekeeping. Amazon adopted item-based collaborative filtering for product recommendations in 1998, and its recommendation engine has been described as one of the earliest large-scale deployments of recommendation technology in e-commerce. The same dynamics operate on adult content platforms. Law professor Amy Adler has argued that from 2007 onwards the pornography industry migrated to algorithm-driven streaming platforms, most of which are controlled by a single near-monopoly company, Aylo (formerly MindGeek). These platforms use algorithmic search engines, suggestions, rigid categorisation of content, and AI-driven search term optimisation in ways that produce the same distorting effects found on mainstream speech platforms, including filter bubbles, feedback loops, and the tendency of algorithmic recommendations to alter individual preferences. == Mechanisms == Recommendation systems commonly combine collaborative filtering, which predicts a user's preferences from the behaviour of similar users, with machine-learning models that predict which content a user is likely to engage with from their prior activity. In a common two-stage design, a platform first generates a set of candidate items from a large content pool and then ranks them using a scoring model with objectives such as predicted engagement or user satisfaction. Small changes in ranking criteria can shift exposure at scale, particularly when applied repeatedly across multiple browsing sessions. These systems typically rely on signals including engagement rates, viewing duration, click-through rates, and network relationships between users. Modern recommendation pipelines continuously update predictions as new behavioural data arrives, allowing platforms to adjust rankings in near real time. Users' revealed preferences, expressed through behaviour such as clicks and viewing time, do not always align with their stated preferences, expressed through explicit feedback such as surveys or content controls. Popularity signals can create feedback dynamics in which early engagement increases the likelihood that content will be shown to additional users. Experimental research on online cultural markets has demonstrated how such feedback processes can produce unequal visibility outcomes even when initial differences in content quality are small. == Beneficial and public-interest uses == Recommendation systems can help users navigate large volumes of content by surfacing material predicted to match their interests or needs, which can improve discoverability on platforms with large content libraries. In public health communication, platforms can help health authorities distribute timely information at scale, though the same recommendation systems also risk amplifying misinformation alongside official guidance. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has argued that the shift from independent blogs to large centralised platforms transferred gatekeeping power from traditional media to corporate algorithms. In the case of the Egyptian uprising of 2011, she noted that ordinary users
Artificial reproduction
Artificial reproduction is the re-creation of life brought about by means other than natural ones. It is new life built by human plans and projects. Examples include artificial selection, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, artificial womb, artificial cloning, and kinematic replication. Artificial reproduction is one aspect of artificial life. Artificial reproduction can be categorized into one of two classes according to its capacity to be self-sufficient: non-assisted reproductive technology and assisted reproductive technology. Cutting plants' stems and placing them in compost is a form of assisted artificial reproduction, xenobots are an example of a more autonomous type of reproduction, while the artificial womb presented in the movie the Matrix illustrates a non assisted hypothetical technology. The idea of artificial reproduction has led to various technologies. == Theology == Humans have aspired to create life since immemorial times. Most theologies and religions have conceived this possibility as exclusive of deities. Christian religions consider the possibility of artificial reproduction, in most cases, as heretical and sinful. == Philosophy == Although ancient Greek philosophy raised the concept that man could imitate the creative capacity of nature, classic Greeks thought that if possible, human beings would reproduce things as nature does, and vice versa, nature would do the things that man does in the same way. Aristotle, for example, wrote that if nature made tables, it would make them just as men do. In other words, Aristotle said that if nature were to create a table, such table will look like a human-made table. Correspondingly, Descartes envisioned the human body, and nature, as a machine. Cartesian philosophy does not stop seeing a perfect mirror between nature and the artificial. However, Kant revolutionized this old idea by criticizing such naturalism. Kant pedagogically wrote: "Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiment thought out in accord with these principles—in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.". Humans are not instructed by nature but rather use nature as raw material to invent. Humans find alternatives to the natural restrictions imposed by natural laws thus, nature is not necessarily mirrored. In accordance with Kant (and contrary to what Aristotle thought) Karl Marx, Alfred Whitehead, Jaques Derrida and Juan David García Bacca noticed that nature is incapable of reproducing tables; or airplanes, or submarines, or computers. If nature tried to create airplanes, it would produce birds. If nature tried to create submarines, it would get fishes. If nature tried to create computers, brains would grow. And if nature tried to create man, modern man, monkeys will be evolved. According to Whitehead, if we look for something natural in artificial life, in the most elaborate cases, if anything, only atoms remain natural. Juan David Garcia Bacca summarized, “It will not come out from wood, it will not be born, a galley; from clay, a vessel; from linen, a dress; from iron, a lever,...From natural, artificial. In the artificial, the natural is reduced to a simple raw material, even though it is perfectly specified with natural specification. The artificial is the real, positive, and original negation of the natural: of species, of genus and of essence. Thus, its ontology is superior to natural ontology. And for this very reason Marx did not attach any importance to Darwin, whose evolutionism is confined to the natural order: to changes, at most, from variety to variety, from species to species... natural. For the same reason, nature has no dialectics, even though continuous evolution and selection can occur. The dialectic cannot emerge from the natural, for deeper reasons than, using today's terms, from a bird, an airplane cannot emerge; from fish, a submarine; from ears, a telephone; from eyes, a television; from a brain, a digital computer; from feet, a car; from hands, an engine; from Euclid, Descartes; from Aristotle, Newton; from Plato, Marx.” According to García Bacca, the major difference between natural causes and artificial causes is that nature does not have plans and projects, while humans design things following plans and projects. In contrast, other influential authors such as Michael Behe have depicted the concept and promoted the idea of intelligent design, a notion that has aroused several doubts and heated controversies, as it reframe natural causes in accordance with a natural plan. Previous ideas that have also provided a positive 'sense' to natural reproduction, are orthogenesis, syntropy, orgone and morphic resonance, among others. Although, these ideas have been historically marginalized and often called pseudoscience, recently Bio-semioticians are reconsidering some of them under symbolic approaches. Current metaphysics of science actually recognizes that the artificial ways of reproduction are diverse from nature, i.e., unnatural, anti-natural or supernatural. Because Biosemiotics does not focus on the function of life but on its meaning, it has a better understanding of the artificial than classic biology. == Science == Biology, being the study of cellular life, addresses reproduction in terms of growth and cellular division (i.e., binary fission, mitosis and meiosis); however, the science of artificial reproduction is not restricted by the mirroring of these natural processes.The science of artificial reproduction is actually transcending the natural forms, and natural rules, of reproduction. For example, xenobots have redefined the classical conception of reproduction. Although xenobots are made of eukariotic cells they do not reproduce by mitosis, but rather by kinematic replication. Such constructive replication does not involve growing but rather building. == Assisted reproductive technologies == Assisted reproductive technology (ART)'s purpose is to assist the development of a human embryo, commonly because of medical concerns due to fertility limitations. == Non-assisted reproductive technologies == Non-assisted reproductive technologies (NART) could have medical motivations but are mostly driven by a wider heterotopic ambition. Although, NARTs are initially designed by humans, they are programed to become independent of humans to a relative or absolute extent. James Lovelock proposed that such novelties could overcome humans. === Artificial cloning === Cloning is the cellular reproductive processes where two or more genetically identical organisms are created, either by natural or artificial means. Artificial cloning normally involves editing the genetic code, somatic cell nuclear transfer and 3D bioprinting. === Non-assisted artificial womb === A non-assisted artificial womb or artificial uterus is a device that allow for ectogenesis or extracorporeal pregnancy by growing an embryonic form outside the body of an organism (that would normally carry the embryo to term) without any human assistance. The aspect of non-assistance is the key distinction between the current artificial womb technology (AWT) in modern medical research, which still relies on human assistance. With this non-assisted hypothetical technology, a zygote or stem cells are used to create an embryo that is then incubated and monitored by artificial intelligence (AI) within a chamber composed of biocompatible material. The AI maintains the necessary conditions for the embryo to develop and thrive, proceeding to mimic organic labor and childbirth in order to best help the embryo adjust to the outside world. Ectogenesis—gestation, depicted in the science fiction movie The Matrix, is a fast approaching reality. This type of innovation presupposes that vertebrate wombs are not the only way for bearing humans or other similar forms of life. === Kinematic replication === Self-replication without binary fission, meiosis, mitosis (or any other form of cellular reproduction that involves division and growing) can be achieved. Xenobots are an example of kinematic replication. They are biobots, named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). Xenobots are cellular life forms designed by using artificial intelligence to build more of themselves by combining frog cells in a liquid medium. The term kinematic replication is usually reserved for biomolecules (e.g. DNA, RNA, prions, etc.) and artificially designed cellular forms (e.g. xenobots). === Machine constructive replication === Machine constructive replication mimics human traditional manufacturing but is entirely self-automated. Such constructive replication is a more general form of kinematic replication, which does not necessarily
U-Net
U-Net is a convolutional neural network that was developed for image segmentation. The network is based on a fully convolutional neural network whose architecture was modified and extended to work with fewer training images and to yield more precise segmentation. Segmentation of a 512 × 512 image takes less than a second on a modern (2015) GPU using the U-Net architecture. The U-Net architecture has also been employed in diffusion models for iterative image denoising. This technology underlies many modern image generation models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. U-Net is also being explored for language models. Tokenization is not a separate step, allowing the model to more easily understand spelling and concurrently vectorizing / tokenizing higher level concepts. == Description == The U-Net architecture stems from the so-called "fully convolutional network". The main idea is to supplement a usual contracting network by successive layers, where pooling operations are replaced by upsampling operators. Hence these layers increase the resolution of the output. A successive convolutional layer can then learn to assemble a precise output based on this information. One important modification in U-Net is that there are a large number of feature channels in the upsampling part, which allow the network to propagate context information to higher resolution layers. As a consequence, the expansive path is more or less symmetric to the contracting part, and yields a u-shaped architecture. The network only uses the valid part of each convolution without any fully connected layers. To predict the pixels in the border region of the image, the missing context is extrapolated by mirroring the input image. This tiling strategy is important to apply the network to large images, since otherwise the resolution would be limited by the GPU memory. Recently, there had also been an interest in receptive field based U-Net models for medical image segmentation. == Network architecture == The network consists of a contracting path and an expansive path, which gives it the u-shaped architecture. The contracting path is a typical convolutional network that consists of repeated application of convolutions, each followed by a rectified linear unit (ReLU) and a max pooling operation. During the contraction, the spatial information is reduced while feature information is increased. The expansive pathway combines the feature and spatial information through a sequence of up-convolutions and concatenations with high-resolution features from the contracting path. == Applications == There are many applications of U-Net in biomedical image segmentation, such as brain image segmentation (''BRATS'') and liver image segmentation ("siliver07") as well as protein binding site prediction. U-Net implementations have also found use in the physical sciences, for example in the analysis of micrographs of materials. Variations of the U-Net have also been applied for medical image reconstruction. Here are some variants and applications of U-Net as follows: Pixel-wise regression using U-Net and its application on pansharpening; 3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation; TernausNet: U-Net with VGG11 Encoder Pre-Trained on ImageNet for Image Segmentation. Image-to-image translation to estimate fluorescent stains In binding site prediction of protein structure. == History == U-Net was created by Olaf Ronneberger, Philipp Fischer, Thomas Brox in 2015 and reported in the paper "U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation". It is an improvement and development of FCN: Evan Shelhamer, Jonathan Long, Trevor Darrell (2014). "Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation".
You Only Look Once
You Only Look Once (YOLO) is a series of real-time object detection systems based on convolutional neural networks. First introduced by Joseph Redmon et al. in 2015, YOLO has undergone several iterations and improvements, becoming one of the most popular object detection frameworks. The name "You Only Look Once" refers to the fact that the algorithm requires only one forward propagation pass through the neural network to make predictions, unlike previous region proposal-based techniques like R-CNN that require thousands for a single image. == Overview == Compared to previous methods like R-CNN and OverFeat, instead of applying the model to an image at multiple locations and scales, YOLO applies a single neural network to the full image. This network divides the image into regions and predicts bounding boxes and probabilities for each region. These bounding boxes are weighted by the predicted probabilities. === OverFeat === OverFeat was an early influential model for simultaneous object classification and localization. Its architecture is as follows: Train a neural network for image classification only ("classification-trained network"). This could be one like the AlexNet. The last layer of the trained network is removed, and for every possible object class, initialize a network module at the last layer ("regression network"). The base network has its parameters frozen. The regression network is trained to predict the ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} coordinates of two corners of the object's bounding box. During inference time, the classification-trained network is run over the same image over many different zoom levels and croppings. For each, it outputs a class label and a probability for that class label. Each output is then processed by the regression network of the corresponding class. This results in thousands of bounding boxes with class labels and probability. These boxes are merged until only one single box with a single class label remains. == Versions == There are two parts to the YOLO series. The original part contained YOLOv1, v2, and v3, all released on a website maintained by Joseph Redmon. === YOLOv1 === The original YOLO algorithm, introduced in 2015, divides the image into an S × S {\displaystyle S\times S} grid of cells. If the center of an object's bounding box falls into a grid cell, that cell is said to "contain" that object. Each grid cell predicts B bounding boxes and confidence scores for those boxes. These confidence scores reflect how confident the model is that the box contains an object and how accurate it thinks the box is that it predicts. In more detail, the network performs the same convolutional operation over each of the S 2 {\displaystyle S^{2}} patches. The output of the network on each patch is a tuple as follows: ( p 1 , … , p C , c 1 , x 1 , y 1 , w 1 , h 1 , … , c B , x B , y B , w B , h B ) {\displaystyle (p_{1},\dots ,p_{C},c_{1},x_{1},y_{1},w_{1},h_{1},\dots ,c_{B},x_{B},y_{B},w_{B},h_{B})} where p i {\displaystyle p_{i}} is the conditional probability that the cell contains an object of class i {\displaystyle i} , conditional on the cell containing at least one object. x j , y j , w j , h j {\displaystyle x_{j},y_{j},w_{j},h_{j}} are the center coordinates, width, and height of the j {\displaystyle j} -th predicted bounding box that is centered in the cell. Multiple bounding boxes are predicted to allow each prediction to specialize in one kind of bounding box. For example, slender objects might be predicted by j = 2 {\displaystyle j=2} while stout objects might be predicted by j = 1 {\displaystyle j=1} . c j {\displaystyle c_{j}} is the predicted intersection over union (IoU) of each bounding box with its corresponding ground truth. The network architecture has 24 convolutional layers followed by 2 fully connected layers. During training, for each cell, if it contains a ground truth bounding box, then only the predicted bounding boxes with the highest IoU with the ground truth bounding boxes is used for gradient descent. Concretely, let j {\displaystyle j} be that predicted bounding box, and let i {\displaystyle i} be the ground truth class label, then x j , y j , w j , h j {\displaystyle x_{j},y_{j},w_{j},h_{j}} are trained by gradient descent to approach the ground truth, p i {\displaystyle p_{i}} is trained towards 1 {\displaystyle 1} , other p i ′ {\displaystyle p_{i'}} are trained towards zero. If a cell contains no ground truth, then only c 1 , c 2 , … , c B {\displaystyle c_{1},c_{2},\dots ,c_{B}} are trained by gradient descent to approach zero. === YOLOv2 === Released in 2016, YOLOv2 (also known as YOLO9000) improved upon the original model by incorporating batch normalization, a higher resolution classifier, and using anchor boxes to predict bounding boxes. It could detect over 9000 object categories. It was also released on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. === YOLOv3 === YOLOv3, introduced in 2018, contained only "incremental" improvements, including the use of a more complex backbone network, multiple scales for detection, and a more sophisticated loss function. === YOLOv4 and beyond === Subsequent versions of YOLO (v4, v5, etc.) have been developed by different researchers, further improving performance and introducing new features. These versions are not officially associated with the original YOLO authors but build upon their work. As of 2026, versions up to YOLO26 have been released..
Ultra Hal
Ultra Hal is a chatbot intended to function as a virtual assistant. It was developed by Zabaware, Inc. Ultra Hal uses a natural language interface with animated characters using speech synthesis. Users can communicate with the chatterbot via typing or via a speech recognition engine. It utilizes the WordNet lexical dictionary. Its name is an allusion to HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ultra Hal won the 2007 Loebner Prize for "most human" chatterbot.
VLLM
vLLM is an open-source software framework for inference and serving of large language models and related multimodal models. Originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab, the project is centered on PagedAttention, a memory-management method for transformer key–value caches, and supports features such as continuous batching, distributed inference, quantization, and OpenAI-compatible APIs. According to a project maintainer, the "v" in vLLM originally referred to "virtual", inspired by virtual memory. == History == vLLM was introduced in 2023 by researchers affiliated with the Sky Computing Lab at UC Berkeley. Its core ideas were described in the 2023 paper Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention, which presented the system as a high-throughput and memory-efficient serving engine for large language models. In 2025, the PyTorch Foundation announced that vLLM had become a Foundation-hosted project. PyTorch's project page states that the University of California, Berkeley contributed vLLM to the Linux Foundation in July 2024. In January 2026, TechCrunch reported that the creators of vLLM had launched the startup Inferact to commercialize the project, raising $150 million in seed funding. == Architecture == According to its 2023 paper, vLLM was designed to improve the efficiency of large language model serving by reducing memory waste in the key–value cache used during transformer inference. The paper introduced PagedAttention, an algorithm inspired by virtual memory and paging techniques in operating systems, and described vLLM as using block-level memory management and request scheduling to increase throughput while maintaining similar latency. The project documentation and repository describe support for continuous batching, chunked prefill, speculative decoding, prefix caching, quantization, and multiple forms of distributed inference and serving. PyTorch has described vLLM as a high-throughput, memory-efficient inference and serving engine that supports a range of hardware back ends, including NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, Google TPUs, AWS Trainium, and Intel processors.
Machine vision
Machine vision is the technology and methods used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision refers to many technologies, software and hardware products, integrated systems, actions, methods and expertise. Machine vision as a systems engineering discipline can be considered distinct from computer vision, a form of computer science. It attempts to integrate existing technologies in new ways and apply them to solve real world problems. The term is the prevalent one for these functions in industrial automation environments but is also used for these functions in other environment vehicle guidance. The overall machine vision process includes planning the details of the requirements and project, and then creating a solution. During run-time, the process starts with imaging, followed by automated analysis of the image and extraction of the required information. == Definition == Definitions of the term "Machine vision" vary, but all include the technology and methods used to extract information from an image on an automated basis, as opposed to image processing, where the output is another image. The information extracted can be a simple good-part/bad-part signal, or more a complex set of data such as the identity, position and orientation of each object in an image. The information can be used for such applications as automatic inspection and robot and process guidance in industry, for security monitoring and vehicle guidance. This field encompasses a large number of technologies, software and hardware products, integrated systems, actions, methods and expertise. Machine vision is practically the only term used for these functions in industrial automation applications; the term is less universal for these functions in other environments such as security and vehicle guidance. Machine vision as a systems engineering discipline can be considered distinct from computer vision, a form of basic computer science; machine vision attempts to integrate existing technologies in new ways and apply them to solve real world problems in a way that meets the requirements of industrial automation and similar application areas. The term is also used in a broader sense by trade shows and trade groups such as the Automated Imaging Association and the European Machine Vision Association. This broader definition also encompasses products and applications most often associated with image processing. The primary uses for machine vision are automatic inspection and industrial robot/process guidance. In more recent times the terms computer vision and machine vision have converged to a greater degree. See glossary of machine vision. == Imaging based automatic inspection and sorting == The primary uses for machine vision are imaging-based automatic inspection and sorting and robot guidance.; in this section the former is abbreviated as "automatic inspection". The overall process includes planning the details of the requirements and project, and then creating a solution. This section describes the technical process that occurs during the operation of the solution. === Methods and sequence of operation === The first step in the automatic inspection sequence of operation is acquisition of an image, typically using cameras, lenses, and lighting that has been designed to provide the differentiation required by subsequent processing. MV software packages and programs developed in them then employ various digital image processing techniques to extract the required information, and often make decisions (such as pass/fail) based on the extracted information. === Equipment === The components of an automatic inspection system usually include lighting, a camera or other imager, a processor, software, and output devices. === Imaging === The imaging device (e.g. camera) can either be separate from the main image processing unit or combined with it in which case the combination is generally called a smart camera or smart sensor. Inclusion of the full processing function into the same enclosure as the camera is often referred to as embedded processing. When separated, the connection may be made to specialized intermediate hardware, a custom processing appliance, or a frame grabber within a computer using either an analog or standardized digital interface (Camera Link, CoaXPress). MV implementations also use digital cameras capable of direct connections (without a framegrabber) to a computer via FireWire, USB or Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. While conventional (2D visible light) imaging is most commonly used in MV, alternatives include multispectral imaging, hyperspectral imaging, imaging various infrared bands, line scan imaging, 3D imaging of surfaces and X-ray imaging. Key differentiations within MV 2D visible light imaging are monochromatic vs. color, frame rate, resolution, and whether or not the imaging process is simultaneous over the entire image, making it suitable for moving processes. Though the vast majority of machine vision applications are solved using two-dimensional imaging, machine vision applications utilizing 3D imaging are a growing niche within the industry. The most commonly used method for 3D imaging is scanning based triangulation which utilizes motion of the product or image during the imaging process. A laser is projected onto the surfaces of an object. In machine vision this is accomplished with a scanning motion, either by moving the workpiece, or by moving the camera & laser imaging system. The line is viewed by a camera from a different angle; the deviation of the line represents shape variations. Lines from multiple scans are assembled into a depth map or point cloud. Stereoscopic vision is used in special cases involving unique features present in both views of a pair of cameras. Other 3D methods used for machine vision are time of flight and grid based. One method is grid array based systems using pseudorandom structured light system as employed by the Microsoft Kinect system circa 2012. === Image processing === After an image is acquired, it is processed. Central processing functions are generally done by a CPU, a GPU, a FPGA or a combination of these. Deep learning training and inference impose higher processing performance requirements. Multiple stages of processing are generally used in a sequence that ends up as a desired result. A typical sequence might start with tools such as filters which modify the image, followed by extraction of objects, then extraction (e.g. measurements, reading of codes) of data from those objects, followed by communicating that data, or comparing it against target values to create and communicate "pass/fail" results. Machine vision image processing methods include; Stitching/Registration: Combining of adjacent 2D or 3D images. Filtering (e.g. morphological filtering) Thresholding: Thresholding starts with setting or determining a gray value that will be useful for the following steps. The value is then used to separate portions of the image, and sometimes to transform each portion of the image to simply black and white based on whether it is below or above that grayscale value. Pixel counting: counts the number of light or dark pixels Segmentation: Partitioning a digital image into multiple segments to simplify and/or change the representation of an image into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyze. Edge detection: finding object edges Color Analysis: Identify parts, products and items using color, assess quality from color, and isolate features using color. Blob detection and extraction: inspecting an image for discrete blobs of connected pixels (e.g. a black hole in a grey object) as image landmarks. Neural network / deep learning / machine learning processing: weighted and self-training multi-variable decision making Circa 2019 there is a large expansion of this, using deep learning and machine learning to significantly expand machine vision capabilities. The most common result of such processing is classification. Examples of classification are object identification,"pass fail" classification of identified objects and OCR. Pattern recognition including template matching. Finding, matching, and/or counting specific patterns. This may include location of an object that may be rotated, partially hidden by another object, or varying in size. Barcode, Data Matrix and "2D barcode" reading Optical character recognition: automated reading of text such as serial numbers Gauging/Metrology: measurement of object dimensions (e.g. in pixels, inches or millimeters) Comparison against target values to determine a "pass or fail" or "go/no go" result. For example, with code or bar code verification, the read value is compared to the stored target value. For gauging, a measurement is compared against the proper value and tolerances. For verification of alpha-numberic codes, the