Product News: AWS' Amazon Lookout for Vision
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Lookout for Vision, a service that analyzes images using computer vision and machine-learning capabilities to spot product or process defects and anomalies in manufactured products.
By employing a machine-learning technique called “few-shot learning,” Amazon Lookout for Vision is able to train a model for a customer using as few as 30 baseline images. Customers can get started using Amazon Lookout for Vision to detect manufacturing and production defects (e.g. cracks, dents, incorrect color, irregular shape, etc.) in their products and prevent those costly errors from progressing down the operational line and from ever reaching customers.
Together with Amazon Lookout for Equipment, Amazon Monitron, and AWS Panorama, Amazon Lookout for Vision provides industrial and manufacturing customers with the most comprehensive suite of cloud-to-edge industrial machine learning services available, according to its maker. With Amazon Lookout for Vision, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee, and customers pay by the hour for their actual usage to train the model and detect anomalies or defects using the service.
Amazon Lookout for Vision offers customers a highly accurate, low-cost anomaly detection solution that uses computer vision to process thousands of images an hour to spot defects and anomalies—with no machine learning experience required. Customers send camera images to Amazon Lookout for Vision in real-time to identify anomalies, such as damage to a product’s surface, missing components, and other irregularities in production lines.
In addition to enabling the service to detect anomalies without large amounts of training data, this capability also allows the service to be adaptable to a wide range of inspection tasks within industrial settings. After analyzing the data, Amazon Lookout for Vision then reports images that differ from the baseline via the service dashboard or the “DetectAnomalies” real-time API so that appropriate action can be taken.
“Whether a customer is placing toppings on a frozen pizza or manufacturing finely-calibrated parts for an airplane, what we’ve heard unequivocally is that guaranteeing only high-quality products reach end-users is fundamental to their business. While this may seem obvious, ensuring such quality control in industrial pipelines can in fact be very challenging,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. “We’re excited to deliver Amazon Lookout for Vision to customers of all sizes and across all industries to help them quickly and cost effectively detect defects at scale to save time and money while maintaining the quality their consumers rely on—with no machine learning experience required.”
