AI-based computer vision technology is set to help reduce waste and scrap at General Shale Inc, America’s largest producer of clay bricks for both residential and business buildings. Computer vision tech developer Visionify.ai has been appointed to provide its technology to help improve automated brick inspection processes on General Shale’s manufacturing lines.

Visionify.ai will deploy an artificial intelligence-based computer vision system that will learn the difference between good and bad bricks. Based on the learning, the vision system will instantly classify the bricks and discard the bad ones. Visionify.ai’s proprietary algorithm will reduce the wastage at the facility by using past heuristics to accurately determine acceptable bricks. The scalable solution will also detect other characteristics like brick colour and composition.

Common problems in any brick manufacturing operation include damaged, cracked or non-conforming bricks. General Shale currently uses ultrasound sensors to detect damaged bricks and remove them from their production line. However, that solution has proven not to be accurate enough and generates more false negatives, creating unnecessary wastage, and impacting the production unit’s bottom line.

“Technologies like ultrasound and infrared are great, but are also very rigid in nature. Building tolerances and acceptable deviations in inspections are not readily possible using those technologies,” said Priyesh Sanghvi, Co-Founder and CEO of Visionify.ai.

Harsh Murari, CTO of Visionify.ai, added, “AI-based computer vision technology is best suited for such scenarios because such systems can be trained to mimic human-like inspection behaviour which inherently allows for acceptable deviations in the inspection system. The performance of such a system improves over time as it sees and learns from more and more samples.”