Onto the Production Line
Noticing the strange look in Wu Chen's eyes, Jiang Hongyue quickly coughed.
"Xiao Wu, why don't you demonstrate the inspection system for us?"
"Sure."
Wu Chen gathered his thoughts.
He had just recalled the moment he died in his previous life.
Back then, before he even had time to give his parents another thought, the world had gone dark.
Once things settle down in a while, I'll go home and see them.
He clicked the button on the computer to start capturing images, and Little Jiang No. 1 immediately went to work.
The first test checked the tablets on a stationary conveyor belt.
There were a hundred tablets in the sample, but twenty had varying degrees of damage and color differences.
This test was sure to pose no problem. In just one second, the twenty defective tablets were marked with red outlines.
Jiang Hongyue and Jiang Nan, however, were not particularly surprised.
When Wang Hongfa and Lavrov had demonstrated Vengeance No. 1, it had passed this step just as easily.
Next came movement matching the conditions of actual production.
At Jiang Hongyue's command, the conveyor belt began to move slowly.
At first, the speed was only 0.8 meters per second, and the tablet inspection accuracy remained steady.
When the conveyor belt's speed rose to 1.5 meters per second, Little Jiang No. 1's accuracy was still 100 percent.
Jiang Hongyue and Jiang Nan exchanged a glance, each seeing hope in the other's eyes.
A speed of 1.8 meters per second was a threshold.
Wang Hongfa and the others had gotten stuck at this step before, their accuracy plunging to 35 percent.
But Little Jiang No. 1 hadn't!
Its accuracy was still above 97 percent!
Jiang Hongyue couldn't help leaning closer to the computer screen, his breathing quickening as he clenched both fists.
Besides him, the other pharmaceutical factory employees in the room also widened their eyes.
It was no secret that Jiangdong Pharmaceutical Factory wanted to install an inspection system, so quite a few universities, research institutes, and companies had come knocking to seek a partnership.
But until now, they had never seen anything achieve this level of inspection!
Looking at the words "Little Jiang No. 1" written in large characters on the camera, the employees couldn't help glancing back and forth between Jiang Nan and Wu Chen several times.
They didn't know that Jiang Hongyue had already crossed Wu Chen off his list of potential sons-in-law, so they had already concluded that there was more to the pair's relationship than met the eye.
Could this be the future young master of Jiangdong Pharmaceutical Factory?
Jiang Nan noticed everyone's gazes too, but she didn't care, nor did she want to explain.
Growing up, she had been troubled by countless rumors and had become completely immune to them.
So she simply kept her eyes fixed on the inspection images on the screen.
The conveyor belt sped up again, reaching 2 meters per second.
The accuracy remained steady.
In the next round of testing, the conveyor belt continued to accelerate, reaching 2.2 meters per second.
This was already full-capacity operation, meaning an output of 300 blister packs per minute!
The recognition data displayed on the computer finally began to fluctuate, and some targets were missed.
This was mainly because the edges of the tablets became slightly blurred as they moved at high speed, resulting in a few tiny color discrepancies.
But after ten repeated tests, with numerous sources of interference added, the recognition rate still reached 94.5 percent!
"It'll work!"
Jiang Hongyue suppressed his excitement, keeping it from showing too plainly.
Under normal circumstances, the production line would not move at 2 meters per second, so Little Jiang No. 1 was already more than good enough.
This thing had enormous potential!
The domestic economy was now flourishing like the sun at high noon, but America had recently been making frequent moves in the Asia-Pacific region. And because of the 2006 conflict in the South China Sea, everyone was worried that relations with the American beasts would deteriorate again and affect the broader environment.
Although the effects had yet to reach the pharmaceutical industry, an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty was already spreading.
Factories everywhere were looking for ways to cut costs and improve efficiency.
If Jiangdong Pharmaceutical Factory could install this inspection system ahead of time, it could save a large sum of money and invest more in developing new drugs, establishing a new advantage!
Jiang Hongyue looked at Wu Chen's still-calm face, and a trace of regret rose in his heart.
The young man's abilities shouldn't be a problem.
But why hadn't he properly completed his studies?
"Teacher Wu, thanks for your efforts. Let's stop the testing here for today."
Jiang Hongyue reassessed Wu Chen once more, but nothing showed on his face.
"All right."
Wu Chen stopped as well and said thoughtfully, "The equipment is still too crude. Otherwise, the accuracy could be improved further."
But the system had provided the sample, which used a purely traditional machine vision approach. The intelligent algorithm was a black box and needed to be evaluated anew.
If he used future technology to improve it, the final accuracy should reach 99.5 percent.
For example, replacing the traditional Haar features with a deeper convolutional neural network architecture could greatly improve accuracy.
Only after doing all that could he probably redeem a production line from the system.
"It's already very good."
Jiang Hongyue noticed that Wu Chen's thoughtful expression was exactly like his daughter's when she ran into a difficult problem.
If he let him stay here and continue making adjustments, he wouldn't stop until it was perfect.
After checking his watch, Jiang Hongyue suggested, "Xiao Wu, I've reserved a table at Lou Wai Lou's Solitary Hill Branch. Shall we have a simple lunch together?"
"Sure."
Wu Chen was hungry too.
Since Jiang Hongyue approved of the product's performance, there was still a lot to discuss afterward. A meal was just the occasion.
They called it a simple meal, but the ingredients included wild large yellow croaker from the East China Sea, fresh matsutake from Yunnan, and even Alaska king crab, all freshly flown in.
The cook was a veteran local chef with authentic skills, and the food had a distinct Hangzhou style.
Food had indeed gone into their stomachs, but their mouths still felt as bland as if they had eaten nothing.
After three rounds of water and five courses of food, Liu Yu, director of Jiangdong Pharmaceutical Factory's information department, raised his glass of water and tapped it against Wu Chen's, keeping its rim lower.
"Teacher Wu, how did you make this intelligent inspection system? Tell us about it."
"It actually wasn't very complicated. The architecture is ARM9 embedded, which saves the cost of a server. The downside is that the cost of each individual unit is too high, and the units can't work together. If it's going to be put to practical use later, it would be best to switch to a distributed computing architecture...
"Of course, the main thing is the algorithm. It's still based on HOG feature extraction and an SVM classifier, and it also integrates CLAHE adaptive lighting compensation and Gaussian bilateral filtering. But to optimize it for the scenario, I combined it with adaptive threshold segmentation and used some of my own optimization algorithms..."
Wu Chen rattled on at length, holding nothing back.
This wasn't his main research area, and he didn't plan to delve into it later, either.
The main parts he described were indeed already in the system, but he had made up the part about adding his own optimization algorithms. The direction, however, was correct.
If saying this could give others some inspiration, that would be a good thing too, and it could accelerate the industry's development.
There was another major reason: he hadn't fully worked out some of the theories involved himself.
The system lottery had only given him the sample, not the accompanying theory.
If he wanted to understand all of it, he would either have to exchange skill points for it or study it himself.
Liu Yu held a doctorate in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University.
At first, he could just barely keep up with Wu Chen, and he was very excited.
People were indeed researching applications of HOG and SVM, but they were still in their infancy, and no one had managed to put them into production.
But once Wu Chen began explaining the algorithm modules in detail, he could no longer keep up.
As for the other technical staff, their heads were even more full of question marks.
Jiang Hongyue listened attentively from the side as well.
Although he didn't understand the technology, he could tell from the expressions on his factory's technical staff that this thing was not nearly as simple as he had imagined.
So while Wu Chen paused to drink some water, he asked a question.
"Teacher Wu, this is a sample, right? Which foreign company's product did you model it on, Siemens or Omron?"
"None. There probably aren't any similar products on the market yet."
Wu Chen said.
As he remembered it, the earliest equipment capable of achieving similar results probably didn't appear until 2015, when it was developed by Bosch in Germany.
Jiang Hongyue froze, his eyes full of disbelief.
"Even foreigners can't make this thing? But the hardware all looks foreign to me."
"Right, but if you want to mass-produce it later, domestic equipment would work just fine."
The sample from the system lottery was solidly made, using the best hardware currently available.
The advantage was a rich ecosystem to work with, since it had a mature supporting framework.
The downside was that it was too expensive.
Take the Sony ICX625 CCD image sensor on it, for example.
It was one of the camera's core components.
But it could easily be replaced with OmniVision Technologies' OV7670 CMOS sensor. It would only require adjusting the driver and image preprocessing parameters, and the price was just one-tenth as much.
"Then, Teacher Wu, could you make another sample using domestic equipment?"
Jiang Hongyue asked quickly.