Newtec's optical sorting equipment for potatoes just got smarter thanks to Hailo AI chip

Qtechnology Selects AI Chipmaker Hailo to Empower its Embedded Industrial Cameras The Qtechnology industrial camera series, now with the Hailo-8™ AI processor, will significantly improve performance for manufacturers worldwide.

Qtechnology (qtec), a global end-to-end developer of customized industrial cameras and turn-key machine vision systems, announced that its leading modular AMD Ryzen embedded V1605B APU-based camera platform running GNU/Linux will now be powered by Hailo-8™.

The enhanced qtec camera series is already being utilized by customers, most notably Newtec Engineering A/S, which reported a 400% increase in the number of pixels processed, a decrease in power consumption, and faster AI model development and deployment using well-established libraries such as Tensorflow and Pytorch.

Production processes powered by AI are key to the smart factory of the future; without it, manufacturers face bottlenecks and high operational costs when producing, managing, and sorting goods.

To meet these challenges, qtec is now integrating the Hailo-8 into their embedded cameras for industrial use, significantly improving their performance.

With easy integration via the PCIe connection, an intuitive software development kit (SDK), and available Yocto recipes, the Hailo-8 ensures fast and efficient AI processing in real-time, while keeping energy consumption low.
 The Hailo-8 handles inference of high-resolution images, unburdening the qtec cameras’ available CPUs and GPUs, so they can prioritize other tasks.

Aleksandar Topic, Software Engineer at qtec:
 

"Hailo’s AI chip is designed to perform a large number of parallel operations. This enables our embedded cameras to efficiently incorporate neural networks into demanding industrial processing pipelines."

"Dedicated components such as the Hailo-8 help us optimize how valuable resources are allocated, which ultimately allows us to perform more sophisticated analysis for our customers

Newtec Engineering A/S relies on qtec’s embedded cameras in the production of their optical sorting machines for agricultural products. With the addition of Hailo’s AI chip, Newtec can now run larger AI models in real-time, leading to improved performance for their customers.

In addition, the low power consumption of the Hailo-8 helps manufacturers better manage challenging thermal conditions machines often face in rugged climates.

Orr Danon, CEO and Co-Founder of Hailo:
 

"qtec is empowering industries by providing them with powerful machine vision systems used in industrial applications to solve real-world problems in a large variety of industries worldwide."

"With the Hailo-8, these systems will be even more powerful, ushering in a new era of smart factories powered by AI at the edge."