FLIR and Neurala Team Up to Meet Growing Demand for Deep Learning Cameras in Industrial Manufacturing

Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence are poised to revolutionize industrial manufacturing by providing greater automation, a way to gain new insights from data generated during production processes, and by introducing new capabilities to previously untapped application areas. Neurala has been on a mission to make AI more useful in real-world applications and help manufacturers improve their quality inspection process, partnering with leading vision system providers and machine builders, and enabling our technology to be delivered as a complete solution for a wide variety of use-cases.

 

However, two major obstacles remain ahead for the manufacturing industry: the lack of AI expertise on the production line and elsewhere, and the cost of most solutions, costs that are driven primarily by hardware (camera, processing power) requirements and in particular, the requirement of external compute power to train Deep Learning models.

 

To meet this challenge, FLIR Systems, the world's largest commercial company specializing in thermal imaging cameras, components and imaging sensors, and Neurala Inc., the leader in on-device vision AI, are teaming up to meet a booming market for AI-powered industrial applications, by combining Neurala’s Visual Inspection Automation (VIA) software capabilities with FLIR’s Firefly DL smart cameras.

The combination of FLIR cameras and Neurala software dramatically lowers the skill and cost barrier to deploy vision AI by manufacturers of all sizes, allowing for rapid development of AI inspection models using very little data. These powerful AI models can then be exported and deployed directly to the Firefly DL camera to automate visual inspections, leveraging the camera’s on-board low power consumption processor, and without the need for a host-PC, allowing for very fast implementation.

VIA, Neurala’s flagship software leveraging 10+ years of Deep Learning development, stands out from competitors as the no-AI-expertise-required Deep Learning software that empowers any user to build custom vision AI models in minutes, using a fraction of the data required by other software platforms.

The collaboration between Neurala and FLIR brings a version of Neurala VIA’s Brain Builder cloud product that is pre-configured, enabling direct export of AI models that can be quickly imported onto FLIR’s Firefly DL cameras with embedded Intel Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit (VPU.) As a result, manufacturers will now be able to unlock power of AI for inspection in multiple places on production line, from raw material intake, to packaging and shipping. This ease of use, fast implementation and low price per inspection point allows for the automation of many more applications for vision AI, where adding visual inspection was previously not practical.