Machine vision systems offer great potential in a large number of areas of manufacturing industry and are used principally for automated visual inspection and robot vision. This publication presents the state-of-the-art in image processing. It discusses techniques which have been developed for designing machines for use in industrial inspection and robot control, putting the emphasis on software and algorithms. A comprehensive set of image processing subroutines, which together form the basic vocabulary for the versatile image processing language IIPL, is presented. This language has proved to be extremely effective as a design tool, solving numerous practical inspection problems. The merging of this language with PROLOG provides an even more powerful facility which retains the benefits of human and machine intelligence. The authors bring together the practical experience from a leading industrial research laboratory and the mathematical foundations necessary to understand and apply concepts in image processing.