By Toby McClean, VP of IoT Technology and Innovation at ADLINK Technology

The Humble Camera Will Help Transform Industries with Machine Vision at the Edge and Signify Creative Destruction in 2020

Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have placed vision applications and the cameras serving as sensors at the forefront of process automation and today's digital transformation. Using an untapped ‘sensor' already in existence in many environments, solutions based on camera data embrace edge computing and the IoT for the ability to access data in real-time to address time-sensitive issues and increase productivity. This makes the camera gateway to exciting new Edge IoT use cases, while also serving as a prodigy and model for future creative destruction that comes with every disruptive technology that improves our productivity and quality of life.

The manufacturing industry (particularly in warehousing, logistics and supply chain) has transformed the use of cameras to include machine vision and computer vision capabilities with various machine learning inferences and AI accelerators running on edge devices. If you want to use video streams to create inferences such as find defects, read bar codes, detect packages and their contents and connect robots to make palletization more accurate you must do that computing at the edge. It's difficult, cost-prohibitive and time consuming to process massive amounts of data in the cloud, and it's simply not viable for many industrial uses cases where data must be acted upon immediately.

The productivity gains from machine vision within manufacturing are exponential and being realized now. For example, a large manufacturing company using ADLINK Edge, an open standard, vendor-agnostic Edge IoT software solution, has decreased the time it takes to build a pallet by 41% and increased its daily throughput by 200% without disrupting the way employees are used to working.

Machine vision with Edge AI is also playing an important role in solving worker safety problems-inside safety zones to detect whether a worker is wearing a safety vest, on oil rigs to extract data with heat-sensing infrared cameras, or monitoring factory floor environments.

The camera as a sensor, working together with machine vision and machine learning technology running at the edge, has a unique ability to solve well-defined problems, increase productivity, enhance worker safety and create new business models. The camera has the momentum and potential to rapidly gain the position as the ultimate source of data in digital transformation.

This underlying technology can be applied in most every vertical industry, as well as government and public sectors. The market for machine vision components grew 9.2% year-over-year in 2018 and is projected to be worth more than $14 billion by 2020.

Next year (2020) will be the year of the camera, as it vastly extends its capabilities far beyond security, entertainment and gaming. Cameras equipped with machine learning inferences and artificial intelligence accelerators at the edge will reveal themselves in new forms: facial recognition and virtual, augmented and mixed reality driven by the camera will quickly become our new reality - all in the name of the power of productivity.

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About the Author

As ADLINK's VP of IoT Technology and Innovation, Toby McClean plays an active role in understanding the pain points of customers and helps them develop technical solutions to solve those problems. Toby has spent almost two decades studying and applying computer science principles to software and system architecture to develop solutions that help to advance next generation business models. He has a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Carleton University in Canada.