At the VISION show in Stuttgart, Germany, Eigen Innovations initiates a paradigm shift in industrial machine vision with a visionary approach of the smart factory. The Canadian company introduces five software tools and cloud services that make vision system development, deployment, and operation more efficient and deliver valuable insights to anticipate issues before they occur.
Eigen Innovations, a vision technology company based in Fredericton, New Brunswick (Canada), introduces a revolutionary software suite at the VISION 2022 show held in Stuttgart, Germany on October 4-6, 2022. The package consists in five tools that help vision system integrators and manufacturers make their vision systems more consistent, more efficient, and more powerful.
Eigen Innovations addresses four key challenges of manufacturers:
1. Capture the right images
2. Scale vision systems across machines, lines, and sites
3. Collect valuable insights
4. Take actions to prevent defects
Predictive machine vision
To achieve that, Eigen Innovations introduces five software tools along with the corresponding IT infrastructure that allow manufacturers to standardize their vision systems, centralize information and gain comprehensive intelligence on their production processes. The result is machine vision that not only inspects and detects defects but also identifies their causes and predicts quality issues before they occur.
EIGEN VISION TWIN is a design tool that helps vision system integrators determine which cameras and lenses will produce the best results. It also automatically calculates the optimal placement of the camera(s). EIGEN VISION TWIN effectively creates a digital blueprint of a vision system to allow for more seamless implementation across multiple sites.
Multiple cameras and viewing angles within a machine and across production lines create a large diversity of image data. This variability can be an issue for consistent image processing and is a challenge to train machine learning models. EIGEN IMAGE TWIN solves this by merging raw image data and creating a virtual and normalized image dataset, regardless of the variation in the camera location. Image processing software detects defects more reliably and machine learning models can be trained with a larger volume of data collected across multiple sources.
Once a vision system is in operation, factory operations teams often waste unnecessary time and energy interpreting vision system data because they are not machine vision experts. EIGEN PRODUCT TWIN eliminates this frustration. It creates 3D part records that combine real image data captured during inspection with original part CAD data. PRODUCT TWIN is intuitive and tells a story about each product, allowing factory teams to be more proactive and efficient. Manufacturers can retrieve this virtual product twin data for defect analysis, traceability, or product liability claims.
EIGEN CLOUD is Eigen Innovations’ solution to unlock the full value of machine vision. It enables manufacturers to go beyond the mere defect detection on a production line. With EIGEN CLOUD, manufacturers can converge vision data across machines, lines, and factories into one central place and augment it with other data from their manufacturing process. EIGEN CLOUD analytics determine correlations between events – e.g., between a tool change and a drift in product quality. The result is a 100% traceability of throughput and process KPIs. With EIGEN CLOUD, manufacturers not only know when defects occur but also why and when they are likely to happen again.
EIGEN EDGE provides the interface between the production lines and EIGEN CLOUD. It takes the complexity out of configuring scalable machine vision applications and allows manufacturers to deploy and manage machine learning models easily in the factory. EIGEN EDGE shares information between vision systems, machines, factory IT and the cloud. With EIGEN EDGE, automatic alerts can be issued to factory teams when EIGEN CLOUD analytics anticipate issues to arise because of a drift in process or image data.
“In our vision of the smart factory of the future, vision systems are standardized across manufacturing lines and sites. They are interconnected to learn from each other. They use machine learning to constantly optimize their performance. The image data they collect is automatically correlated with process data to analyze the root cause of defects. This intelligence generates automated alerts to production teams to take preventive measures before defects occur”, said Erin Barrett, CEO of Eigen Innovations in Stuttgart. “Our software suite provides the toolkit to make this vision a reality”.
Technology rooted in experience
Eigen Innovations has been developing vision solutions for demanding industries such as the automotive and paper industries for more than a decade. Not finding the right tools to solve their clients’ problems, Eigen’s team developed their own, making the most out of machine learning and cloud computing. The result is a set of software tools that are visionary, but also proven in the field.
