Touch Cloud Inc., a subsidiary of Chroma group specializing in edge AI solutions and applications, has been awarded 2018 Top 25 Hottest APAC AI Companies by CIO Advisor. Touch Cloud provides edge AI for detection and protection in the high-tech, smart factory and surveillance industries.
During the manufacturing process, defects that harm product yield and quality need to be detected and classified to protect the production quality and reduce the cost spent on review and repair processes. The company’s AI for AOI improves the real-time defect detection and identification, and provides the defect classification capability with domain knowledge learned by AI.
Today, running a server-based AI requires transferring a large amount of data to the processing power sitting in the cloud and back, and the process has inherent limitations, more importantly, the latency. Such a setup can be used for predictions of business issues and proactivity be addressing those, rather that real-time monitoring of business operations. For instance, modern day scenarios require real-time performance observation, which call for response time in milliseconds. Edge computing can reduce the impact of data technician delay and cost by taking the server side to the field and minimizing resources consumed.
Touch Cloud’s AI Surveillance with edge computing undertakes real-time video and live streaming analytics that helps both detect and identify unusual objects and activities appearing in the field of vision, with high accuracy, unlike existing intelligent Video Analytics (IVA) which only performs detection without any identification. The solution can also inform the user about the motion of the object/person detected which is valuable information from a security perspective for prisons, stations, and factories.
The increasing amount of data generated by manufacturing lines around the globe calls for big data analytics to improve detecting the root cause of the defect, accompanied by customers seeking more accurate and efficient image analytics in manufacturing lines. AI running on edge devices helps industry 4.0 to facilitate abnormality prediction and root cause analytics in manufacturing plants.
Touch Cloud entrusts NX Witness VMS with managing the connectivity to different types of IP cameras and basic functions such as video storage, while Touch Cloud oversees the analytics. Touch Cloud’s flexible architecture to embed their AI engine with NX’s software, and expansion of Touch Cloud’s business footprint using NX’s installed base, drivers the collaboration between them.
Chroma ATE Inc., the parent company of Touch Cloud, offering test and measurement instrumentation, automated test systems, manufacturing execution systems (MES), and test and automation turnkey solutions, supports raw data collection from the manufacturing line. “Together with Chroma, we provide customers the turnkey solution equipping each Chroma machine with Touch Cloud AI engine to assist customers in IoT data analytics and predictions for manufacturing improvement,” states Simon Lee, co-founder and CEO of Touch Cloud.
Touch Cloud aims to continue developing practical use cases of its solutions while integrating with AI and AOI machine and software vendors. Planned AI applications under intelligent transportation system include advanced driver assistant system (ADAS) and driver behavior detection. Under intelligent security system, Touch Cloud intends to improve the traditional IVA’s function and accuracy, developing tracking and detection of objects in motion. The company also intends to extend its geographical footprint to different countries with different approaches by hiring agents to promote their solutions.