Machine vision interfaces typically come in two flavors: dedicated and consumer.

Dedicated interfaces; Useful for applications where extremely high-speeds or ultra high-resolution necessitate the use of such interfaces; for example, line-scan cameras used to inspect continuous flow processes like paper or plastic film production where cameras frequently work in the kHz range. However, these interfaces tend to be significantly more expensive, less flexible and add to system complexity. CarmeraLink (supports up to 6.8Gbit/s of data) and CoaXPress (supports up to 12Gbit/s) are dedicated machine vision interfaces typically used in such applications. In addition to the cameras, systems using these interfaces require frame grabbers. These are specialized adapter cards to receive image data and assemble it into usable images. Dedicated machine vision interfaces also use proprietary cables, making integration with other peripherals a little more challenging.

Consumer interfaces; These interfaces enable machine vision cameras to connect with host systems using widely available USB and Ethernet standards. For most machine vision applications, the USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gigabit Ethernet consumer interfaces provide a winning combination of convenience, speed, simplicity and affordability.Furthermore, consumer interfaces support widely available hardware and peripherals for machine vision implementation. 

Both consumer and dedicated interfaces are used across many machine vision applications.

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