The fourth industrial revolution is rapidly emerging as a new innovation trend for industrial automation. Accordingly, the demand for inspection equipment is highly increasing and vision sensor technologies are continuously evolving. Machine vision algorithms applied to deep learning are also being rapidly developed to maximize the performance of inspection equipment. In this review, we highlight the recent progress of vision sensor technology for the industrial inspection system. In particular, inspection principles and industrial applications of a vision sensor are classified according to the vision scanning methods. We also discuss machine vision-based inspection techniques containing rule- and deep learning-based image processing algorithms. We believe that this review provides novel approaches for various inspection fields of agriculture, medicine, and manufacturing industries.