APIT and Qualitas Co-develop the Total Mill Analyser

From an industry application to a product

APIT, a machine builder serving the rice industry, partnered with Qualitas to co-develop the Total Mill Analyser. The collaboration combines APIT's knowledge of rice-milling applications with Qualitas's machine-vision expertise and technical collaboration from Intel.

A unit has been delivered, and the product is now being launched into the market. The partnership gives other machine builders a concrete example of how an industry-specific analysis application can become a product developed with a specialist vision partner.

Look at the grains, then the sample

A rice sample can contain grains with different appearances and processing states. To make those differences useful to an operator, the software needs to locate individual grains and distinguish the visible classes within the captured view.

The annotated examples show rice, discoloured grains, paddy and brown rice. Each box identifies a grain and displays the software's classification. The result gives the operator a visual way to review what the software has identified in the sample.

Image acquisition is part of the analysis

The camera needs a clear view of the grains before the software can classify them. The supplied sample views show grains against a contrasting blue background, making their outlines and appearance visible. Grain presentation, lighting and the camera view need to work together so that the features of interest can be seen.

The software then locates grains and assigns classes to the visible regions. Showing those annotations alongside the image helps explain the analysis: the operator can see which grain has been identified and the class assigned to it.

A machine-builder route to market

The partnership extends beyond an inspection application for one factory. APIT and Qualitas have co-developed a product that is being brought to the rice-industry market.

For a machine builder, this approach connects knowledge of the customer application with specialist imaging and analysis expertise. Defining the sample, the visible features and the information needed by the operator gives both teams a practical starting point for developing the product together.

From co-development to launch

One unit delivered. Product launch underway.

The Total Mill Analyser demonstrates the partnership approach in a tangible product: an OEM's industry knowledge and Qualitas's vision expertise applied to rice analysis, with Intel technical collaboration.

Developing a vision-enabled product for your customers? Share the recurring application, sample parts or materials, required checks and intended machine workflow. Qualitas can work with your team to assess image acquisition, analysis outputs and integration requirements for an OEM product partnership.

Discuss an OEM product partnership with Qualitas.