Surface defect inspection, decided at the camera in 12 ms

The challenge

Parts left the cell faster than a cloud round trip would allow, and the plant handles controlled technology, so streaming imagery off site was not permitted. Manual inspection covered a sample, which meant the true escape rate was unknown rather than low.

What we did

1. Two-day site survey covering optics, lighting, mounting and the existing reject mechanism
2. Production footage captured across three shifts, including changeovers and night-shift lighting
3. Annotation schema agreed directly with the quality team, so classes matched existing paperwork
4. Model trained and optimised to hold line rate on the industrial edge unit being installed
5. Integrated with the cell's PLC over OPC UA to drive the reject gate already in place
6. Four-week supervised run in shadow mode before the system was permitted to act

Outcome

Every part is now inspected instead of a sample, the decision is made on the device at the cell, and no imagery leaves the plant network. The quality team owns the dataset and the annotation schema.