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New IOTech partnership to deliver artificial intelligence and visual inference at the Internet of Things edge
Fri, 3rd Sep 2021
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Edge software company IOTech has announced it has entered into a partnership with machine learning company Lotus Labs.

The partnership is set to deliver artificial intelligence and visual inference solutions at the IoT edge. The partnership enables IOTech to integrate Lotus Labs' computer vision technology into its edge software solutions.

According to IIOTech, this combination provides a functionality that is especially useful for companies building intelligent solutions across vertical use cases. These include loss prevention in retail, crowd management in entertainment venues, manufacturing component fault detection, COVID-19 safe-distancing management, and smart safety systems within industrial plants.

The integrated solution will enable the data from conventional sensors and OT endpoints to be combined with the results from the latest AI and video inference technologies to provide a much more accurate real-time operational picture and make smarter decisions from the fusion of data.

"An IoT edge system's ability to obtain immediate local insights from vision-based analytics will revolutionise how businesses create new value through their operations," says Keith Steele, chief executive IOTech.

"Our partnership with Lotus Labs creates new opportunities to provide our customers with advanced AI and visual inference solutions," he says.

IOTech has pilot programs underway at major sporting venues and anticipates soon deploying AI and visual inference solutions for a number of these.

Lotus Labs, based in Arizona, provides visual inference through Padm, its AI platform. Padm will be integrated with IOTechs Edge Xpert to offer a comprehensive solution for computer vision at the edge. The solution will support a range of use cases, including people counting, predictive maintenance, product quality checking and theft detection. All of these increase in accuracy through AI and video inference..

"Growth and advancements in AI, machine learning, computer vision and edge computing are coalescing to disrupt traditional business models," says Anjali Nennelli, founder and CEO, Lotus Labs.

"Our partnership with IOTech is another step forward in this journey to combine advanced technologies at the IoT edge to deliver new value for the enterprise," he says.

The global video analytics market size was valued at $4,102.0 million in 2019, and is projected to reach $21,778.0 million by 2027, registering a CAGR of 22.7% from 2020 to 2027 (source Allied Market Research, April 2021). This growth represents a massive opportunity for vendors such as IOTech and Louts Labs who supply the software technologies that will help drive this adoption.

IOTech's Edge Xpert edge computing platform is supported by a pluggable open architecture for computer vision that allows users to run their AI algorithms and vision models at the edge. Edge Xpert allows users to easily control camera devices, collect video streams and automatically apply AI and vision inference right at the edge. The platform supports deploying models that can include object detection, classification and recognition; it passes the inference results to other services for real-time decision making.