【2022 Solutions】 Using AI vision to replace human vision, Claireye Intelligence uses AI to help the manufacturing industry with quality control
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In response to customer demand on a wide variety of products in small quantities in the manufacturing industry, there is an urgent need to find AI solutions from the cloud to terminals. Claireye Intelligence provides a solution that integrates software and hardware - BailAI image inspection solution to assist traditional manufacturing industries in improving process efficiency and product quality, thereby achieving the initial goal of transformation.
After the government declared 2017 to be Taiwan's "First Year of AI," AI startups have sprung up in Taiwan. Established in 2018, Claireye Intelligence targets smart manufacturing and provides a platform for AI image analysis and process optimization, using the power of deep learning to detect product defects and abnormalities in the assembly process. It assists companies in building infrastructure from terminals to the cloud, which enables automated monitoring of factory production to improve process efficiency and quality.
Focusing on AI image inspection based on its familiarity with the production line quality control process
Shirley Liu, founder and CEO of Claireye Intelligence, is a young entrepreneur. She entered the manufacturing industry after graduating from college and held a quality control position in the plastic injection process of hard disk parts. "She was already on the production line at the time, and is familiar with the production line process of production machinery." She later switched career paths to marketing and planning, and then worked as an AI product manager. When the time came, Shirley Liu decided to start a business, focusing on AI image recognition in the manufacturing industry.
"The difficulty for enterprises is the lack of an AI development team. Even if an enterprise has an AI team, development projects will take a lot of time, at least 6-12 months" said Shirley Liu, who is well versed in the market's pain points. The problem that needs to be solved by platforms is to provide services that allow traditional manufacturing industries to build their own AI models without needing employees with a programming background, and to remotely assist production lines with troubleshooting and subsequent system maintenance, helping companies save development time and labor costs.
▲BailAI image inspection platform usage scenarios
Facing the large number of competitors that provide AI image recognition in the market, what are the technical advantages of Claireye Intelligence? Shirley Liu said that many companies currently have AOI equipment, but the bottleneck in the application of AOI is that it can only be used for defect inspection in fast production of large quantities, and parameters need to be adjusted after each inspection or production. Based on her understanding of the industry, most SMEs are limited by their financial resources due to AOI equipment often costing over NT$1 million, but they also want to use automated inspection. This is where Claireye Intelligence comes in.
Shirley Liu went on to say that it is impossible for traditional manufacturing industries to maintain a technical team that includes AI engineers, data engineers, cloud architects, and terminal architects. Claireye Intelligence specializes in software and hardware integration. Enterprises can use the BailAI image inspection platform to easily solve inspection problems on the production line. In other words, customers only need to provide images or samples for Claireye Intelligence to carry out model training, model deployment, and system integration, and they can easily use AI technology to optimize and monitor production line processes.
Participated in the AI+ New Talent Selection and achieved a recognition rate of over 90% in assembly behavioral image recognition.
For example, a certain connector manufacturer only has 1-2 AI engineers in its technical team. The main problem that needs to be solved is that most operators are on the production line, while quality control and senior managers are not on site, and the company wants to understand the actual situation of the production line through remote monitoring. Claireye Intelligence uses industrial cameras to capture production line images, and transmits AI image analysis to the remote end. Supervisors and quality control personnel can observe if there are any errors in the production line assembly, such as whether the connectors and lines are connected properly, through the monitor.
Claireye Intelligence's AI image inspection operates on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, and also utilizes terminal equipment, such as NVIDIA's edge computing equipment placed around the inspection station, to assist traditional manufacturing industries with improving production line efficiency and detecting problems early through an integrated solution from the cloud to terminals. Claireye Intelligence’s customers currently include aviation, electronic peripherals, connectors, and metal industries.
▲ Assembly process solution for human behavior recognition in assembly lines achieves an accuracy of over 90%
In order to demonstrate the depth of technology, Claireye Intelligence participated in the 2021 AI+ New Talents Selection of the Industrial Development Bureau, Ministry of Economic Affairs, and provided Lite-On Technology with the "assembly process solution for human behavior recognition in assembly lines." The solution determines effective working hours and ineffective working hours of operators on the production line through cameras and AI image recognition. It recognizes hand posture and position through images to determine the operator's assembly behavior, achieving an accuracy of over 90%.
Shirley Liu added that the assembly process of electronic components is complex, mostly carried out manually, and cannot be replaced by robotic arms. Claireye Intelligence used cameras to film the assembly process of operators at Lite-On's assembly station. The algorithm is then trained and corrected based on the video, and the final trained model can directly determine whether there are any errors in the assembly process to improve the overall process.
Project development time is expected to be shortened to 1 month by using the BailAI image inspection platform
Since its establishment more than three years ago, Claireye Intelligence has accumulated a considerable amount of project experience and hopes to commercialize the project experience. Shirley Liu pointed out that the trial version of BailAI image inspection will be completed this year (2022). Customers can choose industrial cameras or video cameras based on the detail of the object being inspected. It can even use X-rays to capture images, and then the images are automatically marked by the platform. Claireye Intelligence will provide customers with AI application models suitable for the field. Inferences can also be made in the cloud or terminals for launch in the manufacturing industry. The metals industry, metal casings of industrial computers, connectors, electronic peripherals, and mechanical parts can all use the platform for defect detection and object identification.
Claireye Intelligence will continue to improve its technical capabilities, accumulate customer experience to complete commercialization, and also accelerate the implementation of AI inspection applications. In the mid-term, it will build terminal and cloud infrastructure and shorten the development time of enterprise AI projects from 6-12 months to 1 month, reducing usage time and lowering the threshold for enterprises. The long-term goal is to target the Southeast Asian market where Taiwanese businesses are gathered, expand software and hardware integrated AI solutions to overseas markets, and expand the scale of operations.