Sustainable Machine Vision for Industry 4.0: A Comprehensive Review of Convolutional Neural Networks and Hardware Accelerators in Computer Vision

As manifestations of Industry 4.0. become visible across various applications, one key and opportune area of development are quality inspection processes and defect detection. Over the last decade, computer vision architectures, in particular, object detectors have received increasing attention from the research community, due to their localisation advantage over image classification. However, for these architectural advancements to provide tangible solutions, they must be optimised with respect to the target hardware along with the deployment environment. To this effect, this survey provides an in-depth review of the architectural progression of image classification and object detection architectures with a focus on advancements within Artificially Intelligent accelerator hardware. This will provide readers with an understanding of the present state of architecture–hardware integration within the computer vision discipline. The review also provides examples of the industrial implementation of computer vision architectures across various domains, from the detection of fabric defects to pallet racking inspection. The survey highlights the need for representative hardware-benchmarked datasets for providing better performance comparisons along with envisioning object detection as the primary domain where more research efforts would be focused over the next decade.