The emergence of machine vision as a ubiquitous platform for innovations has laid the foundation for the rapid growth of information. Side by side, the use of mobile and wireless devices such as PDA, laptop, and cell phones for accessing the Internet has paved the way for related technologies to flourish through recent developments. In addition, machine vision technology is promoting better integration of the digital world with the physical environment. This special section focuses primarily on research in the field of machine vision. The purpose is to review the progress and achievements of the research work to date. Topics of interest for this special section include: machine vision systems and components (hardware and software, sensor fusion), machine vision applications (industrial inspection, navigation, optical metrology, autonomous vehicles, remote sensing, astronomy and astronautics, bio-medical imaging, face and gesture recognition, data compression, security and coding, document processing), computer vision (scene reconstruction, video tracking, 3D pose estimation, action recognition), active vision (autonomous cameras, wearable and assistive computing, realtime 3D scene segmentation and reconstruction), 3D vision (stereovision, laser triangulation, multi-cameras), machine learning (artificial intelligence, neural networks, deep learning, big data, and data mining), image processing (analog, digital, electronic, optical, acoustical, hybrid), image processing methods (pre-processing, image analysis, feature extraction, segmentation, classification, pattern recognition, coding, understanding, modeling, color, texture, shape, geometry, topology, SIMD, MIMD), and computational imaging.