Leading digital solution provider, Zebra Technologies has announced a series of advanced AI features enhancing its Aurora machine vision software to provide deep learning capabilities for complex visual inspection use cases.  

Zebra’s Aurora software suite with deep learning tools provides powerful visual inspection solutions for machine and line builders and engineers, programmers and data scientists in the automotive, electronics and semiconductor, food and beverage and packaging industries.

The suite features no-code deep learning optical character recognition (OCR), drag and drop environments, and extensive libraries that allow users to create solutions to solve complex use cases that traditional rules-based systems struggle to address.

Zebra Technologies regional sales manager for Australia and New Zealand, Nathahn Walter said, “In Australia, we see growing demand for AI and machine vision technologies as businesses across industries recognise the need to enhance operational efficiency and accuracy. Our solutions are helping local manufacturers stay ahead in a competitive landscape by automating critical processes and maintaining the highest standards of quality and compliance.” 

Users of Zebra’s Aurora Design Assistant integrated development environment can create applications by constructing and configuring flowcharts instead of writing traditional program code. The software also enables users to design a web-based human-machine interface (HMI) for the applications. 

The software now comes with deep learning object detection and the latest version of the Aurora Imaging Copilot companion application with a dedicated workspace for training a deep learning model on object detection. Separate add-ons are available for training a deep learning model with an NVIDIA GPU card and running a deep learning model to perform inference or prediction on an NVIDIA GPU and Intel integrated GPU, respectively.  

Machine and computer vision engineers using Aurora Vision Studio can quickly create, integrate, and monitor powerful machine vision applications. Its advanced and hardware-agnostic software provides an intuitive graphical environment for the creation of sophisticated vision applications without the need to write a single line of code.

It has a comprehensive set of over 3,000 proven and ready-to-use filters, enabling machine and computer vision engineers to design customised solutions in a simple, three-step workflow: design the algorithm, create a custom local HMI or on-line Web HMI and deploy it to a PC-based industrial computer.

Zebra’s Aurora Imaging Library software development kit is for experienced programmers coding vision applications in C++, C# and Python. It includes a broad collection of tools for processing and analysing 2D images and 3D data using traditional rules-based methods, as well as those based on deep learning.

The latest additions expand its capabilities with the introduction of anomaly detection tools using deep learning for defect detection and assembly verification tasks where the aim is to find abnormalities. Unlike other available deep learning tools, the training is unsupervised, only needing normal references.