Shortwave infrared (SWIR) imaging is quietly earning a growing place in industrial machine vision for quality inspection. SWIR imagers, sometimes also referred to as NIR imagers, can see objects and events that vision and thermal cameras cannot. Moreover, they’re’ smaller and lighter than all thermal cameras, and cost far less than many of them (See table below). Furthermore, most indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) SWIR cameras are all solid state, with no shutters, cooling systems or other moving parts. Some come factory set, with no need for user nonuniformity corrections throughout their entire service lives. All SWIR imagers work with plain glass optics, avoiding the thermal camera requirement for silicon or germanium lenses, which can cost 10 times as much. The installed base for InGaAs SWIR detection is steadily rising in both military surveillance and industrial imaging primary due to the low noise and simple operation of these cameras and arrays. These devices permit detection in the SWIR band with minimal cooling and electronic overhead, making the cameras similar in operation to silicon CCDs and CMOS imagers. With the increasing use of InGaAs cameras, people’s confidence in using these cameras 24/7. SWIR-based machine vision systems have proven themselves, economically and technically, across the industrial landscape.

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