Are you familiar with the rotating segment/sector lighting?  While not commonly known the concept has been around for a while.  It is a method of lighting a part from different sides to create multiple sets of shadows on a part.  These images are then combined into one composite image and filtered to reveal features and topography that are difficult to detect otherwise.

This integration process can be challenging to someone new to machine vision.  On many systems a camera might take one image per assessment of a parts condition.    This rotating segment process typically takes from two to eight images that are then put together in a composite image.  That composite image often yields information that allows the machine vision system to work more effectively.

While good machine vision integrators can do this independently it is still challenging.

Machine vision companies that specialize with cameras only are at a disadvantage as the customer has to do all the development of the system parameters. 

Lighting companies have started presenting solutions but they are dependent upon outside resources to take advantage of their work.

With this particular technique the machine vision companies that provide vision systems and lighting together have knitted all of these pieces of hardware collectively to provide an off the shelf solution.  The best example of this would be Keyence and their Lumitrax system.