TL;DR: Dust, shadows, glare, reflections and vibrations are real – but solvable – environmental conditions on the shop floor. In production environments we protect lenses, add the right lights, and match camera/lens to the job. Reflections on glossy parts are the hardest nut to crack; they usually need a custom, multi-angle lighting setup. With sound lighting and optics, environmental conditions rarely block AI-based visual inspection.
Another market report with encouraging numbers just landed in my inbox. The surface vision and inspection market – according to Consegic – is growing from roughly $4.6B to $8.4B between 2025 and 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 9.4%.
However, that isn’t the part of the report that caught my attention; it was the section about key restraints which they identified as “environmental conditions”, so everything from glare to dust. In this article, let’s look at the issues mentioned in the executive summary of the report and how our experience on real shop floors compares.
Challenging Environmental Conditions on the Shop Floor
First of all, yes, shop floors can be challenging environments. Most products aren’t made in clean rooms and dust/fines are a common issue. Lighting can be tricky, if it’s too dark, details may be lost, too bright and you are dealing with shadows and glare. The trickiest problems are reflections from glossy, shiny surfaces. Anyone who has ever tried to photograph a product wrapped in a transparent plastic bag knows the problem. Vibration add another challenge: motion blur requiring fast shutter speeds or work arounds
These challenges are real but, in our experience, they can be addressed with some tweaking, selection of the right lighting, accessories, and the correct camera and lens combination.
Let’s look at them one by one.
Challenging Environmental Conditions on the Shop Floor #1: Dust
A universal challenge for many manufacturers from those making construction materials to food producers. Dust settles on surfaces including camera lenses rendering them blind and eventually useless. Wiping them regularly is an option, but not a particularly practical one in many environments, especially if the lenses are mounted in difficult to access places.
Solution: Industrial Strength Lens Protection
We found that opting for a camera/lens system that comes with lens protection accessories is the way to go. Modern solutions shield lenses from solid materials like dust, sand, other fines and dirt but also protect them against water. We recently operated a camera/lens/lens protection combination on the shop floor of a company manufacturing construction materials without any issues and without wiping the lens even once. Best of all: these industrial strength lens protection solutions are readily available and very affordable so you can use them on every single lens on the shop floor – just in case.
Challenging Environmental Conditions on the Shop Floor #2: Too Dark
The light on the shop floor often doesn’t shine where you need it for visual inspection or production equipment throws shadows just where you need to take your images.
Solution: Off-the-Shelf Lighting Solutions Customized to the Situation
There is an amazing variety of different and generally affordable options available to enhance the lighting right where you need it. We have used large light bars to evenly illuminate entire pallets and small ring lights for the extremely fast-moving line of a consumer-packaged goods manufacturer. It might take a bit of tweaking and trying out different products and/or settings to find the optimal solution, but in each and every case we quickly honed in on a configuration that evenly lights the product without shadows.
In short, lack of light has never been a serious issue for us and we found affordable, commercially available solutions to properly illuminate the products for visual inspection.
Challenging Environmental Conditions on the Shop Floor #3: Glare and Reflections
Glare is stray light that washes out contrast and hides texture and edges and reflections are what you see in a mirror: a recognizable image of you, the light source, nearby features like the wall, or whatever else is around. Reflections add false features to the image that the model may mistake for real ones or hide defects that would be easy to spot on a non-reflective surface.
Solution for Glare: Use of Colored Light
We have successfully dealt with glare: our Accella DockCheck™ application automatically detects packages and reads their barcodes to determine whether the right number and type of products are being received or shipped. Barcodes, it turns out, have a surprising amount of glare that makes it challenging to read them from afar, especially in the context of reading a relatively small barcode on a large package. The solution was avoiding white light in favor of a red light. The glare almost completely disappeared and the barcodes were readable.
Solution for Reflection: Custom Lighting
Reflections from highly polished surfaces – especially those that are almost mirror like and three dimensional (think “nooks and crannies”) – are the most challenging. They likely require a custom solution consisting of several light sources, different colored light and a variety of angles. Structured and/or polarized light might be necessary and some tweaking.
Defect detection on highly polished aftermarket rims is an application for which we successfully developed a custom solution based on our Accella Quality Box™. Several different lights of different colors, shining at the rims from different angles were necessary to detect scratches as small as 0.5 mm. While it wasn’t easy to perfect the lighting, the AI-based, automated solution, once perfected, reliably and consistently detects even the smallest defects – a very difficult and time-consuming process for humans.
Challenging Environmental Conditions on the Shop Floor #4: Vibrations
Fast-moving lines and nearby heavy equipment often introduce mechanical vibration at the camera, the lighting, or the product itself. Even when the movement is small, it translates into motion blur, shimmering edges, and a loss of fine texture that reduces contrast for the model. Certain line speeds can excite resonances in brackets or light stands, so blur appears intermittently—sharp one moment and soft the next—which makes performance look inconsistent at production speed.
Solution: Control vibration and shorten effective exposure
In our experience, a rigid, compact mounting setup is the first step. If needed, you can add vibration damping or isolation between the machine frame and the vision hardware to avoid transmitting the worst frequencies. Global-shutter cameras are preferable because they capture the entire frame at once. Shorter exposure times limit blur; but might make the images too dark – adding task lighting or strobes is the solution for this challenges. Finally, it’s best to trigger image capture from an encoder or sensor tied to the line so frames are taken at a consistent point in the motion cycle. These measures keep images crisp and comparable over time, enabling reliable, production-speed inspection even when the environment isn’t perfectly still.
Summary
Environmental conditions on the shop floor can make implementation of AI-based visual surface inspection somewhat tricky, especially if large and highly-polished products need to be inspected. However, dust, sand, dirt, low light, glare, reflections and vibrations can be dealt with and an experienced partner and a robust AI-based platform can help you generate images that are good enough for the algorithms to make very accurate (>99.99%) and consistent defect calls.
Let us know if you have any questions, we are happy to discuss your specific use case.