An automated container terminal (ACT) is a cutting-edge type of container terminal that uses automated equipment and sensors to achieve autonomous applications such as container loading/unloading, horizontal transportation, and yard operations. It has integrated state-of-the-art sensing technologies, ensuring low operating costs, high throughput capacity, and enhanced management security. Vision-based measurement (VBM) is an especially advanced technology that obtains richer surrounding information from captured image data in comparison with other technologies. Due to its great potential capabilities, it has played a critically important role in ACT to realize productive vision-based tasks, e.g., target recognition, positioning, and geometric determination. This paper generally presents an overview of a VBM system, typical applications of VBM systems in ACT, as well as the challenges and future development trends of VBM in ACT.