Computer Vision for Industrial Engineers - Continuous Improvement

28 Dec, 2022

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Matroid Computer Vision | SEE IT.  DETECT IT.

Matroid Computer Vision | SEE IT. DETECT IT.

Deep-Learning technology helps industrial engineers with continuous improvement, line balancing, and optimizing manual labor.

Industrial engineers are key to ensuring production lines don’t miss a beat.  Their eyes are always on the lines looking for every potential weak link within the production flow.  Ideally an industrial engineer could continuously keep an eye on all things at once to detect imbalances on production lines that cause decreased yields and poor utilization of manual labor, all of which diminish productivity and profitability.    

 

By applying video cameras in areas that depend on manual labor, industrial engineers can feed that digital data into a Computer Vision AI system and begin to capture video analytics on cycle time, non-value add time, anomalies, action sequences, and much more.  The Computer Vision AI models are trained to understand various actions and sequences of those actions so that manual labor operations are digitally validated and recorded.  Intelligent Computer Vision AI systems integrate into other various IT/OT systems, such as machines, MES, ERP, etc., bringing actionable insight to operational systems and digital traceability to business systems.  

 

A continuous capture of manual labor provides valuable information about cycle times and non-value add time spent during operational hours.  The power of deep-learning is applied to differentiate the amount of time spent between effective production time vs. non-value add time.  With this information further conclusions can be drawn, and alerts can be created.  For example, if too much time is spent assembling a part this can be flagged for further analysis.  The industrial engineer can view a video playback of the operation to determine if this is a result of something that can be resolved (i.e. operational inefficiency, quality defect, or true anomaly).  If an operator takes more time than what has been normalized to assemble parts, Computer Vision AI can help capture the root cause of common quality defects.  In other scenarios information is captured over time that can provide clues to any non-productive trends.  This type of information allows industrial engineers to apply their lean-manufacturing skillsets for continuous improvement, such as reengineering workspaces, tooling, and improving line balancing upstream or downstream.  

 

Humans have 5 senses and of those, 80% of all impressions come from sight.  Visual data is one of the easiest sources of data to generate.   Computer Vision AI leverages the latest in machine-learning / deep-learning technologies to make sense of visual data.  Using any type of camera technology (visible and invisible spectrums) Computer Vision AI learns and detects what is visible from the data and provides analytics on the detections.  These new tools are empowering industrial engineering experts to continuously improve their operations to keep a competitive edge with quality, efficiency, and productivity.