THE CHALLENGE

Cucumber developed a new mobile logistics solution to replace ISL’s legacy system used to validate, track and load logs onto ships.

ISL wanted the ability to automatically count the number of logs in each load to validate the manual count of logs scanned.

The sample photo of logs below shows the environment where successful counting had to be achieved. There is shadow covering some of the logs as well as logs from another load being visible to the right of the photo.

OUR APPROACH

The existing system was using mobile devices to scan the barcodes on logs as they are being loaded onto ships. By using the camera to take a photo of the logs, could a computer program count the logs accurately enough?

Cucumber implemented an image recognition engine using a computer vision for a machine learning model. Powered by AI (artificial intelligence), the image recognition engine enables computer assisted identification and counting of logs.

The issues

The image recognition engine had to be taught what was the end of a log and what wasn’t. But the logs are loaded 24/7 in all weather conditions which meant the image recognition had to be accurate in

• Bright sunlight

• Rain

• At night with artificial (and poor) lighting

• Different angles

The image recognition engine also had to not count any of the loading equipment as a log as well as cope with the log bundles being uneven so that some logs were further away from the camera than others (see example photo earlier in this article).

Training log recognition

In order to improve recognition performance, the results were judged by a human against a range of photos in all conditions and fed back into the engine. In this way, the engine could be taught by being “told” when it had identified a log that wasn’t a log and when it had not identified a log.

“The whole team were fantastic. There were no surprises, except how well it went. Every single person exceeded my expectations, I’ve never come across a team where everyone excelled. They understood our business requirements, they asked the right questions and really took me along with them. They delivered exactly what we needed”

ISL