With the impact of an unprecedented pandemic and increasing amount of industrial automation, worker safety is not to be taken lightly, as safety concerns have become an issue of widespread concern around the world. Enforcing compliance with policies for the appropriate use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and limiting personnel to the locations for which they are equipped results in reduced work-related accidents, thus improving employee safety while also supporting steady productivity. These practices also enable organizations to avoid expensive and reputation-damaging citations from government agencies monitoring industrial environments.
Therefore, there’s a significant demand for applications ensuring worker safety such as physical identification and compliance for sensitive environments, monitoring of industrial settings with heavy machinery in use, keeping track of security zones with restricted personnel access, and more. Many are turning to AI-powered machine vision-based applications to ensure compliance and maintain enforcement using a centralized architecture. By doing so, these organizations have successfully automated their systems via a combination of smart cameras, sophisticated machine vision applications, and industrial computing solutions that do not require human resources to ensure compliance. These systems are better equipped than humans to complete tasks of this kind.
Portwell Industrial Edge Vision Orchestrator combines these technologies to deliver AI-enabled access control and monitoring solutions. This machine vision-based system relies on AI to quickly and easily determine if employees are wearing appropriate PPE, clean suits, or other required equipment in the proper areas. Machine vision systems can quickly and easily identify measurements, color, temperature, and the number of elements an employee may be wearing.
An excellent solution case of Portwell Industrial Edge Vision Orchestrator is in the printed circuit board (PCB) production facility. Portwell provides an advanced, high availability, and convenient system to monitor employees’ policy compliance. This includes required dress code, safety regulation compliance, and thermal detection for pandemic management throughout multiple areas, including the factory floor front entrance, and in other restricted areas.
When combined with Intel’s industrial technologies, Portwell Inc.’s industrial computing solutions provide an excellent solution for smart monitoring solutions. In particular, Portwell’s WEBS series of edge industrial systems and LEAD series of panel PCs offer its industrial customers significant flexibility for processing the images, video, and time-series data common to AI and machine vision applications.
Portwell WEBS series supports multiple Intel® CPU platforms, from those based on Intel® Celeron® processors to platforms based on Intel® Core™ i7 processors, which provide significant computing power for demanding industrial applications and compute applications like AI. The LEAD series offers customers incredible flexibility, as they can employ this series simply as a monitor, as a Portwell Networking Display (PND) for basic computing power, or even as a Panel PC for Intel® Pentium® N4200 series and more. Those customers adopting WEBS solutions and LEAD solutions as an integrated system now have a single solution for their industrial applications.
Portwell’s Industrial Edge Vision Orchestrator leverages Intel’s portfolio of industrial IoT technologies, including the Intel® OpenVINO™ toolkit for AI, computer vision, and Intel® Edge Insights for Industrial (EII) software. EII is a collection of field-proven modular software applications that enable companies to securely ingest, analyze, and store video and time-series data. EII is based on an open and flexible microservices-based architecture optimized for Intel-based hardware and silicon solutions. This optimization, in turn, makes EII ideal for Portwell’s computing systems, which use Intel silicon technologies to provide superior performance.
Portwell also integrates Intel® Iris® Xe MAX graphics solutions, which offer outstanding performance from both the CPU and GPU. Intel® Deep Link technology matches the right workload with the right compute solution—enabling discrete graphics for creation. At the same time, 11th Gen Intel Core processors power great productivity with 20 percent more CPU performance than systems with third-party graphics solutions. Intel Deep Link technology enables faster, richer AI capabilities for less waiting and more creating, with 7x better AI performance than other discrete graphics.3 Plus, quad encode engines deliver class-leading streaming and sharing, with over 75 percent faster encode.