In the era of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing, industrial machine vision technology is evolving rapidly. Acting as the “eyes” of automation equipment, machine vision systems capture and analyze production data with precision.
However, many industrial environments have suboptimal lighting — especially at night or in low-lit indoor settings. In such cases, advanced night vision becomes essential, and Sony’s STARVIS 2 night vision technology stands out as a leader, bringing transformative capabilities to industrial machine vision.
STARVIS 2 employs a back-illuminated (BSI) pixel architecture that positions the photodiode above the wiring layer, avoiding light loss from wiring interference. This significantly improves light collection efficiency, enabling clear imaging in environments as dark as 0.009 lux.
Industrial vision often relies on near-infrared illumination for low-light imaging. STARVIS 2 incorporates refractive microstructures that increase NIR light absorption efficiency by approximately 2.5× compared to conventional sensors, allowing clear capture of contours and textures even in complete darkness with NIR illumination.
By optimizing the photodiode’s structure to store more photons, STARVIS 2 achieves a 78 dB single-exposure dynamic range — about 2.5× that of earlier models. This ensures bright and dark regions are both accurately rendered in mixed-light environments, preventing highlight blowout and shadow detail loss.
In dynamic production environments, traditional DOL HDR can cause ghosting or color artifacts due to time gaps between exposures. Clear HDR in STARVIS 2 captures bright and dark regions simultaneously, ensuring sharp, color-accurate images of fast-moving objects — ideal for conveyor inspection and real-time tracking.
Its stacked sensor architecture with Cu-Cu interconnects reduces power consumption by around 30%, lowering energy costs, reducing heat load, and improving system reliability for 24/7 industrial operations.
In large factories and warehouses, night-time surveillance is critical. A major automotive plant deployed STARVIS 2-based cameras that produce full-color images at 0.009 lux, delivering over 95% recognition accuracy even in unlit aisles. This reduced false alarms from 50 per day to under 5, boosting security efficiency and lowering operational waste.
In substations and transmission corridors, lighting conditions range from bright sunlight to deep shadows. UAV-mounted STARVIS 2 cameras use wide dynamic range and NIR sensitivity to detect fine cracks and thermal anomalies in power lines at night, increasing inspection accuracy from 80% to 92% and efficiency by 30%.
Marine and port construction tasks often require underwater robots to operate in near-total darkness. A dredging robot equipped with a 1/2.8" STARVIS 2 sensor and three-axis stabilization captures stable, color images at 0.009 lux, improving mapping precision by 25% and extending mission times by 30%.
A smartphone manufacturer integrated STARVIS 2-equipped cameras into automated PCB inspection systems. Even under low-light conditions, they detect defects as small as 0.1 mm with over 98% accuracy, using the same parameter settings day and night — reducing manual adjustments and increasing throughput by 18%.
With its unmatched combination of low-light sensitivity, NIR optimization, wide dynamic range, artifact-free HDR, and low power consumption, Sony STARVIS 2 night vision technology is enabling higher efficiency, accuracy, and reliability in industrial vision systems — from security and inspection to underwater operations and automated quality control.
As Industry 4.0 progresses, demands for advanced low-light and high-speed imaging will only grow. STARVIS 2 is poised to remain a cornerstone technology for the next generation of industrial automation and smart manufacturing.
If you’re an engineer, integrator, or product manager working on factory inspection systems, automation robots, industrial monitoring, or low-light quality control, we invite you to:
Contact us today to explore how STARVIS 2 technology can give your vision system an edge in performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
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