Any references for the trade-off between software and mechanics/optics in industrial machine vision systems? I explain my question with a simplified example.

I can design an industrial vision system for the automatic inspection of an item with these main requirements:


the image of a good piece must be a black background and the piece must be grey.
the defect must appear as a white area inside the grey area.


These requirements simplify a lot the software part of the system: in order to classify an item as defective the algorithm just counts the white pixels.

But in order to get this straightforward algorithm I have to be very good at designing the lighting/optical/mechanical part of the system and maybe that part will cost more than the software.

Maybe in the past I read a sentence like "do as much as possible with the mechanics and as little as possible with the software"; it seems to me it was in a book of the 1990s (or 1980s) about practical machine vision but I can't find the proper citation/reference.
I have found some "proverbs" like:


  Never use software to compensate for a poor lighting system. 
  It is not cost effective and will result in a poor system design.
  
  It is cheaper to add a light-proof shroud to keep sun-light away from
  the object under inspection than to modify the software. Another
  universal truth which is often forgotten.
  
  Nothing exceeds the speed of light. Any processing that can be done
  optically will save a lot of computer processing later.


in the book "Intelligent Vision Systems for Industry" by Bruce G. Batchelor and Paul F. Whelan and also in B.G. Batchelor and P.F. Whelan (1994), "Machine vision systems: Proverbs, principles, prejudices and priorities", Proceedings of the SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, Vol. 2347 - Machine Vision Applications, Architectures, and Systems Integration III, Boston (USA), pp 374-
383. (see here http://elm.eeng.dcu.ie/~whelanp/proverbs/proverbs.pdf).

The proverbs are also in the 2012 book "Machine Vision Handbook", Editors: Bruce G. Batchelor ISBN: 978-1-84996-168-4.