Google Cloud launched Visual Inspection AI, a purpose-built solution to help manufacturers, consumer packaged-goods companies, and other businesses worldwide reduce defects and deliver significant operational savings from the manufacturing and inspection process.
Google Cloud has traditionally supported manufacturing quality control through its general purpose AI product, AutoML. Today, it is taking the next step by offering a purpose-built solution for manufacturers. Using Google Cloud's leading computer-vision technology, Visual Inspection AI automates the quality-control process, enabling manufacturers to quickly and accurately detect defects before products are shipped. By identifying defects early in the process, customers can improve production throughput, increase yields, reduce rework, and reduce return and repair costs, per Google.
Based on pilots run by Google Cloud customers, Visual Inspection AI can build accurate models with up to 300 times fewer human-labelled images than general-purpose ML platforms. This allows the solution to be deployed quickly and easily in any manufacturing setting, per its maker. In addition, Visual Inspection AI customers improved accuracy in production trials by up to 10X compared with general-purpose ML approaches. Visual Inspection AI’s deep learning allows customers to train models that detect, classify, and precisely locate multiple defect types in a single image.
“AI has proven to be particularly beneficial in helping to automate the visual quality-control process for manufacturers, a particular pain point felt by the industry. We’ve been delighted by the strong interest in Visual Inspection AI, and we look forward to supporting more organizations as they continue to find innovative new ways to deploy AI at scale,” said Dominik Wee, managing director manufacturing and industrial at Google Cloud.
“We've been listening to the specific needs of the industry, and have brought the best of Google AI technologies to help address those needs. The outcome is an AI solution that, built upon years of computer vision expertise, is purpose-built to solve quality control problems for nearly any type of discrete manufacturing process,” added Mandeep Waraich, head of product for industrial AI at Google Cloud.
