SiftAI® Smart Table for Foreign Material Detection & Potato Grading
Turnkey Artificial Intelligence for Foreign Material Detection, Sorting, Sizing, and Grading Potatoes
The SiftAI® Smart Table is an all-in-one inspection solution for potato processors to automatically sort, grade, size, and detect unwanted foreign materials with little to no human intervention. Each system is trained with artificial intelligence (AI) models to analyze product attributes at high volumes, accurately routing and sorting products on user-defined criteria. As a turnkey solution, each SiftAI® Smart Table is customized to meet the exact customer specifications.
SiftAI® Smart Table safeguards against harmful foreign materials (FM) that can potentially damage equipment, prompt fines from customers, or introduce allergens into final products.
Features
- Designed to handle high product volumes (e.g., 180,000 lbs of potatoes per hour).
- Programmed with robust AI models to automatically classify products for user-defined traits.
- Custom-configured systems that are easily scalable as needs change.
- Robust, intuitive software.
- All manufactured components are from a single supplier.
Benefits
- Labor savings: Reduce and redistribute labor where needed at your facility.
- Unmatched accuracy: Removes subjectivity from sorting and grading procedures.
- Improved throughput: Allows processors to operate at higher capacities.
- Improved food safety: Eliminate foreign materials from the entire process flow.
- Superior process control: Real-time analysis and record keeping aid in business decisions and vetting of suppliers.
Applications
The SiftAI® Smart Table is customized to meet the diverse needs of all potato processors to eliminate unwanted foreign materials and boost operational efficiency.
Typical Users Include
- Chip Potatoes: Automatically identify and remove harmful foreign materials and objects that can lead to costly food safety hazards and customer fines.
- Process Potatoes: Identify and remove harmful foreign materials and objects while establishing acceptance tolerances for product defects and cosmetic traits that are important to customers.
- Fresh Pack Potatoes: Remove foreign objects and materials that can damage equipment and hamper process flow, while also ensuring customers receive top-quality potatoes.
Common System Configurations
Communication Throughout the Process
Vision-Based Lane Balancing
How It Works
Leveraging AI, the SiftAI® Smart Table “learns” to focus on ideal products on the conveyor, then immediately acts if foreign materials or unwanted products appear anywhere in the product stream.
AI-Powered Vision Inspection & Automation
The SiftAI® Smart Table is equipped with specific AI models trained to identify foreign and unwanted indigenous materials or calculate the size, shape, presence of defects, or any other product qualities that can be perceived by a human sorter. These models are continually refined and retrained over time. With the power of AI, potato processors have a solution to analyze various attributes with remarkable precision, allowing companies to operate at greater capacities and redistribute labor where it is needed most.
The SiftAI® Smart Table automatically scans products as they pass through individual lanes. Products are continuously tumbling on the roller belt, allowing the system to capture a complete view of the product.
Defect Detection: Based the product feature’s rejection fingers at the system’s dropping point will direct products with defects to a particular stream. If the product meets all the ideal visual criteria, it continues to drop onward to later process stages.
Foreign Material Detection: The system will immediately remove objects from the product stream into a lane to be discarded.
AI Models that Evolve to Your Standards
The installation of the SiftAI® Smart Table on your processing line is just of your partnership with KPM Analytics. Our AI Model experts continually work with you to advance the capabilities and accuracy of the system over its entire life.
AI Model building is a process of teaching the system to differentiate product on a conveyor from other objects. After segmenting the product, the AI rapidly scans the image for presence of defects, discolorations, or other features programmed by the user. Each individual feature is an AI Model. And because the user or a KPM Analytics AI expert is continually monitoring the performance and accuracy of the system, the more objects and samples the SiftAI® Smart Table analyzes, the stronger the AI model becomes.
How the SiftAI® Smart Table Detects Product Defects
1) The SiftAI® camera takes a picture of product on a conveyor.
2) The AI system separates the product from the conveyor.
3) The AI then scans the product for presence of defects based on the AI Model criteria. From there, it automatically calculates the defect percentage and determines next steps (let the product proceed or reject it from the product flow).
How the SiftAI® Smart Table Detects Foreign Materials
Foreign material detection follows a similar process to defect detection. Equipped with AI models for foreign materials (sticks, rocks, golf balls, wood, plastic, and many others) the SiftAI® Smart Table scans the conveyor for objects different from the target product. This includes foreign objects of similar color and texture.
Our Sorting Technology
SiftAI® systems are designed specifically for sorting and inspection. Leveraging artificial intelligence, our innovative technology enables your processing facility to control the quality and consistency of your products while reducing labor costs.
SiftAI® is faster, more reliable, and more cost-effective than human graders and other sorting systems. If your packing shed is still using outdated optical sensors, SiftAI® can integrate into them as a drop-in replacement, effectively transforming and improving your operations.
End-to-end Quality Assurance
SiftAI® Smart Table is just one part of a complete line of AI-driven solutions for potato processors.
Command Quality & Food Safety Throughout Your Process
From pre-sorting to downstream sorting, sizing, and grading, through final product inspection, SiftAI® offers comprehensive and automated quality control that allows processors to achieve higher throughput with superior accuracy and reduced labor.
Most vision systems can’t handle products with mass variations. SiftAI's advanced technology accounts for natural variations in your products with unrivalled precision, effectively discerning between defected and viable products. Defects in potatoes, for example, that we can find include:
- Green
- Growth Crack
- Misshapen (banana, heart, knob, pear, and other)
- Mud
- Sprouts
- New Bruise
- Old Bruise
- Pressure Bruise
- Rhizoct
- Rot
- Frozen
- And more...
From pre-sorting to downstream sorting, sizing, and grading, through final product inspection, SiftAI® offers comprehensive and automated quality control that allows processors to achieve higher throughput with superior accuracy and reduced labor.
Most vision systems can’t handle products with mass variations. SiftAI's advanced technology accounts for natural variations in your products with unrivalled precision, effectively discerning between defected and viable products. Defects in potatoes, for example, that we can find include:
- Green
- Growth Crack
- Misshapen (banana, heart, knob, pear, and other)
- Mud
- Sprouts
- New Bruise
- Old Bruise
- Pressure Bruise
- Rhizoct
- Rot
- Frozen
- And more...
Software & Online Support
Constant System Monitoring, Constant System Improving from KPM Analytics' AI Experts
SiftAI® Smart Table systems are paired with powerful software to continuously monitor your production process and provide data for operations and reporting. The user interface is intuitive, and operators can monitor production lines in real time, label and categorize foreign material, and provide analysis or health check reports. APIs also exist for gathering analytics data and quality metrics to load into an ERP, offering users valuable insights into their overall process.
The Software as a Service (SaaS) is a yearly subscription service that includes regular software updates and AI model augmentation, providing you with the most up-to-date technology for high accuracy and precision. KPM Analytics can access the system to send updates and allow 24/7 support should any issues arise.
Specifications
Resources
We've highlighted a few knowledge center resources here to help you understand the product better. Please also visit our Knowledge Center for additional information and downloads, and don't forget that our team is always happy to answer any questions you have.
