The Journal of Electronic Imaging (JEI), copublished bimonthly with the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, publishes peer-reviewed papers that cover research and applications in all areas of electronic imaging science and technology.

Early fault detection and real-time condition monitoring systems have become quite significant for today’s modern industrial systems. In a high volume of manufacturing facilities, fleets of equipment are expected to operate uninterrupted for days or weeks. Any unplanned interruptions to equipment uptime could jeopardize manufacturers’ cycle time, capacity, and, most significantly, credibility for their customers. With the help of smart manufacturing technologies, companies have started to develop and integrate fault detection and classification systems where end-to-end constant monitoring of equipment is facilitated, and smart algorithms are adapted for the early generation of fault alarms and classification. This paper proposes a generic real-time fault diagnosis and condition monitoring system utilizing edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) and a data distributor open source middleware platform called FIWARE. The implemented system architecture is flexible and includes interfaces that can be easily expanded for various devices. This work demonstrates it for condition monitoring of autonomous transfer vehicle (ATV) equipment targeting a smart factory use case. The system is verified in a designated industrial model environment in a lab with a single ATV operation. The anomaly conditions of the ATV are diagnosed by a deep learning-based fault diagnosis method performed in the Edge AI unit, and the results are transferred to the data storage via a data pipeline setup. The proposed system’s Edge AI solution for the ATV use case provides significant real-time performance. The network bandwidth requirement and total elapsed data transfer time have been reduced by 43 and 37 times, respectively. The proposed system successfully enables real-time monitoring of ATV fault conditions and expands to a fleet of equipment in a real manufacturing facility.

Common vector approach (CVA) is an increasingly popular classification method in recognition problems where probability of having the dimensionality of the problem higher than the number of data items is not zero. In CVA, common component of the members of classes is separated from the discriminating difference parts and used to determine whether a given vector (a block of data) belongs to the class in question, or to find out the class it belongs to. In this study, overlapping image blocks near the current pixel to be denoised are used as input data and a class is constructed per pixel position. Denoised image block is then constructed with the sum of common vector of the class and difference vector of the centre block denoised by linear minimum mean square error estimation technique. Since the classes are formed using similar blocks, the edges are preserved while denoising the image.