Self-learning algorithms combined with image processing offer enormous possibilities. However, many companies still have reservations about AI, so that urgent automation processes are not tackled at all or are approached using classic methods. “We want to encourage companies to significantly improve their processes and products by helping them to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by AI and industrial cameras,” says Jan Hartmann, CEO of IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH. To this end, IDS is expanding its AI vision portfolio, offering expertise and tools to provide a comprehensive application development from concept to integration. This means that the camera manufacturer is evolving from a component supplier to a holistic AI vision partner.
In application development, there is not only one single AI solution. Moreover, a particular AI vision system is not always the suitable answer to a specific problem. Simplicity, cost, performance and time belong to the most important and decisive criteria for the use of AI vision technologies. The fact that AI-based methods work completely differently than rule-based approaches is both an advantage and a challenge. However, this in turn enables manufacturers like IDS to develop entirely new types of tools for image processing that can be used much more intuitively. With them, human quality requirements can be transferred to AI-based image processing systems through machine learning in order to optimize and automate processes. Often, not a single line of source code needs to be written in the process, making AI vision suitable for entirely new target groups that no longer need to have coding skills. Companies are no longer necessarily dependent on programmers and image processing experts at this stage.
Save time, money and realise you application quicker
With IDS NXT, the company offers an AI Vision system with optimally coordinated components that can be used by all user groups. This saves valuable time, expensive development resources and gets the user to his individual solution faster. Individually trained neural networks for object detection, classification or anomaly detection as well as industry-standard interfaces and communication protocols turn the autonomously operating cameras into fully-fledged inference systems. Easy-to-use tools cover the entire development process from image to the final AI application. The cloud-based AI vision studio IDS lighthouse helps to manage image data sets, train neural networks and create complete image processing sequences as vision apps for IDS NXT cameras.
However, a stand-alone camera is not always the most suitable platform for a machine vision application. For various reasons, the use of a PC-based system in conjunction with classic industrial cameras may be necessary or advantageous. Performance, connectivity, flexibility, integration into existing systems, to name but a few. Ultimately, the requirements of the planned application alone determine which advantages of a platform are best suited for implementation. However, as a user, you are often faced with the situation of having to decide between different machine vision components for a particular system – with all their advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, since you cannot cherry-pick and put together your own, you are often forced to make compromises.
New: PC-based AI Vision available thanks to DENKnet
In addition to the IDS NXT system, which is suitable for rather simple and cost-optimized projects, IDS is also setting the course in the area of “high performance” vision applications to offer everything from a single source as an AI partner. For this reason, the Fraunhofer spin-off DENKweit GmbH and the image processing company IDS Imaging Development Systems GmbH have joined hands.
With DENKnet, individual image analysis with leading AI vision technologies and highest performance (PC-based) can be implemented in just a few minutes with as few as 15 training images. The system takes care of the necessary stability, performance and the right choice of technology automatically in the background. Thus, the operation through the no-code tool “DENK VSION AI HUB” is designed to be very simple. With the combination of DENKnet image processing and IDS cameras, image processing solutions with highest performance (GPU accelerated) and quality can be realised.
The choice of the appropriate system therefore depends on the user, his expertise and the intended application. IDS positions itself here as a partner that satisfies different requirements and brings AI vision as easy-to-use technology into industrial image processing.
