This paper reviews the main ideas of technology and applications relevant to industrial machine vision. The technology areas reviewed include image creation, image processing and analysis, system architectures for machine vision, and incorporation of machine vision into the factory environment. The application areas reviewed include inspection tasks related to gauging, verification, flaw detection, symbol recognition and object recognition, and guidance tasks related to 2D and 3D position sensing, orientation and tracking. TTis paper also discusses the directions research and development might take to enhance the contribution of machine vision to automation.