Market Overview

It has been said that AI-utilized image analysis systems are about be in spreading phase, but user companies have been reluctant to step into full-scale investment due to high cost and vagueness in cost effects.

Currently, deployment of image analysis systems, especially the following four fields, is at last underway: Vehicle recognition that identifies the vehicle itself or the vehicle numbers, face recognition that identifies a person through the image of faces or determines the attributes from the information of faces, marketing that analyzes store-visiting customers mainly for retailers, and visual inspection that identifies any defective products at manufacturing industry. The external sales market for image analysis software packages from various vendors including AI vendors is about to be launched.

The FY2022 image analysis system market (total four categories, based on the sales at vendors) is projected to grow by 15.0% on a YoY basis to 6,060 million yen. While rapid expansion is expected for the entire market, the levels of growth rate are likely to differ by category.

Noteworthy Topics

For image analysis software and image analytic engines, AI venture companies have attempted variously for commercialization.

Recently, however, commoditization of AI-used image analytic technologies has been in progress, as there have been free software and general-purpose AI software emerged in the market mainly by major US vendors for IT and low-price software released by Asian vendors including China. 

In addition, commoditization has been accelerated by major existing as well as newly emerged camera manufacturers such as IRIS OHYAMA Inc. and Safie Inc., as they have adopted AI-used image analysis software to embed it into their camera devices.

While the image analysis system market is expected to expand hereafter, such hardware vendors in the market are likely to face competition or make efforts to coexist.

Future Outlook

While deployment of image analysis systems is in progress, one of the technological challenges is recognition rate. Being affected by external environment, it is difficult to bring the recognition rate to 100%, no matter how superior the algorithm may be. In addition, for the field that show apparent labor shortage, rapid increase is expected in deployment of image analysis systems in the hope of its ability to make decisions on behalf of humans.

CAGR of the image analysis system market from FY2021 to FY2025 is expected to reach 19.2%, with the market size to exceed 10,000 million yen by FY2025 to 10,650 million yen.

Research Outline