I worked in industrial machine vision from about 1990-2005. What we saw happening was a gradual shift from dedicated systems with DSP and specialized hardware t

I worked in industrial machine vision from about 1990-2005. What we saw happening was a gradual shift from dedicated systems with DSP and specialized hardware to PC framegrabbers with most processing on the host to firewire and cameralink cameras with everything on the host. The libraries from Cognex and Matrox as well as open-source solutions have become so good and easy to use that some of the mystique of machine vision has disappeared. I think there are still tons of interesting machine vision applications but the systems development itself has become largely commoditized.