The manufacturing industry has been going undergoing a major digital transformation. The traditional model is evolving to be known as Industry 4.0. With rapid developments in different areas including imaging techniques; CMOS sensors; embedded vision; machine and deep learning; robot interfaces; data transmission standards and image processing capabilities, computer vision technology can benefit the manufacturing industry at different levels. New imaging techniques have provided new application opportunities. Developments in computer vision technology has led to enhanced performance, integration and automation in manufacturing industry. Let’s deep dive to understand various use cases of computer vision at different stages of manufacturing, but before that let’s understand what is a computer vision?

Computer Vision

It is a field of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science that aims to provide computers a visual understanding of the world. The goal of Computer Vision is to emulate human vision using digital images through three main processing components:

1. Image acquisition

2. Image processing

3. Image analysis

Now, let’s understand its top 5 applications in the manufacturing industry.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance is a method of preventing the failure of expensive manufacturing equipment, by analysing data throughout production to pinpoint unusual behaviour ahead of time, to ensure appropriate measures can be taken to avoid extended periods of production downtime.

_Better predictive maintenance using IoT can reduce equipment downtime by up to 50 percent and reduce equipment capital investment by 3 to 5 percent…In manufacturing, these savings have a potential economic impact of nearly $630 billion per year in 2025.- _McKinsey

Ever imagined if you can get an alert from a mobile app ahead of a fault which is going to occur. Sound interesting right? Thanks to predictive maintenance, it tells us when to replace the part, reducing planned downtime and keeping the product running for an optimum amount of time. This helps to eliminate unnecessary repair costs.

#machine learning #manufacturing #artificia intelligence