In many plants there are cameras, lighting and other hardware that once formed part of a visual inspection system that is no longer fit for purpose. Zohar Kantor, vice president of sales at visual inspection software company Lean AI, explains why equipment-agnostic software technology could breathe new life into existing machine vision hardware.

Estimates suggest that between 2017 and 2020, approximately 270,000 machine vision systems were installed around the world. How many of these are still performing as intended? A common issue is the lack of interoperability between different hardware components, or between hardware and software. Some software solutions are vendor-specific,requiring the purchase of new cameras and other sensors.

Quality managers and plant managers are unfortunately not fully aware that there is an alternative solution in retrofitting. If a software solution is equipment-agnostic, meaning it can operate with hardware from different vendors, it is possible to bring new capacity to old investments.

If the existing image acquisition equipment is perfectly acceptable in terms of image quality and illumination, then software was the problem. Why not leverage existing hardware by finding a software solution that will work in tandem? Lean AI is currently putting this theory into practice with a leading powder metal company in Canada. Lean AI’s artificial intelligence algorithms work with any hardware, so the company can make use of cameras and computer hardware already in the plant, removing the need for the customer to rip it out and start again. Retrofitting in this way saves time, money and risk.
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