1、 I’m glad to interview president Zhou again. I remember that Baimai participated in visionchina (Shenzhen) Exhibition for the first time at the end of 20 years. At that time, President Zhou mentioned that under the background of urgent upgrading and transformation of the manufacturing industry, consumer electronics, semiconductors, new energy vehicles and other industries will usher in better development. Looking back on 2021, the embers of the epidemic are still repeated, but it is difficult to stop the rapid development of these industries. Does Baimai have a layout for this? What results have been achieved?
In the post epidemic period, the industrial manufacturing market needs to face the instability and new pressure of the overall environment, such as the sudden shortage of raw materials, the rapid change of demand and the shortage of manpower becoming the new normal, but it also brings many new opportunities. Manufacturing enterprises are more active than ever in strengthening the flexibility and digitization of operation, improving productivity and operation efficiency, and shortening the production cycle, so as to improve the ability to deal with the crisis and respond more effectively to the changes and shocks of external conditions. At the same time, take a series of measures, such as strengthening the management ability of product process through automatic equipment monitoring and process control system, optimizing the operation of equipment, further improving the overall efficiency, improving output and quality, and meeting the changing customer needs.
Baimai has established a visual inspection application capability center to help manufacturing enterprises improve efficiency and product quality through visual inspection and save labor costs. This is a team with comprehensive capabilities, shouldering the mission of internal and external empowerment, specializing in advanced application technologies and solutions in the industry, taking root in the needs of the industry and solving industry problems. It not only provides visual inspection application solutions to help 3C electronics, semiconductors and other manufacturing industries accelerate the innovation of visual inspection applications and the landing of application scenarios, but also sets up an optical laboratory with complete facilities to carry out ecosystem construction with equipment manufacturers and users, improve the ability of industry case evaluation, and strengthen the operation and application of visual inspection platform. Baimai scheme engineer has consultant level visual scheme ability, and is fully responsible for project evaluation, scheme selection and implementation, so as to guide the efficient promotion of the project.
Visionpk visual inspection platform is the “eye” and “brain” built by Baimai for industry. It is mainly composed of image analysis algorithm software, image acquisition camera, light source, host and other parts. It has completely independent underlying technology and provides complete, mature and high-performance algorithm library toolbox, covering 2D application scenarios of general machine vision. Baimai has carried out ecological cooperation with the rapidly developing AOI equipment manufacturers, and has successfully deployed applications in batches in many industry projects. By establishing a joint laboratory, we can efficiently transfer the visual ability to our partners, give them professional visual scheme construction comprehensive ability, including visual software and hardware knowledge and detection platform operation experience, and solve the detection tasks of various application scenarios in the vertical industry. Therefore, many intelligent manufacturers quickly have AOI visual detection capability, so as to integrate and expand to more fields, solve the technical threshold and achieve the cost goal, and realize the import substitution.
2、 Machine vision software not only has a high technical starting point, but also has a long development cycle. Compared with hardware, it has higher risks. What was the reason why you chose the machine vision software industry?
Since its establishment, Baimai technology has always adhered to the route of focusing on the research and development of underlying technologies, and successfully conquered the last virgin land of visual machine vision – visual inspection. There are a large number of mature automation equipment manufacturers in China, but the visual algorithm software has long relied on virtue led image processing software for secondary development and application, which has poor universality and long delivery cycle. In the last round of global industrial automation, American and Japanese testing enterprises solved the problem of positioning measurement. Since then, the technology in the field of industrial vision has been occupied by the United States and Japan for a long time. China’s demographic dividend meets the human demand for manual detection in the short term. Coupled with the limitations of hardware and computing power, the demand for high-end visual detection is not strong in the development stage of intelligent manufacturing. When it was founded, Baimai focused on the most difficult visual inspection, specializing in visual inspection software and algorithm technology. It has excellent defect detection ability and cross industry universality. Up to now, it has empowered a large number of equipment manufacturers and successfully built an upstream and downstream cooperation ecology of the industry. In the field of machine vision software industry, compared with hardware, the market of industrial vision software is broader and needs to be reclaimed. We insist on doing this extremely difficult but correct thing to fully empower the partners of vision application equipment manufacturers.
3、 Looking at the whole machine vision industry, what level do you think the domestic vision software technology is at now? What is the urgent problem to be solved?
China is the most active region in the global machine vision market. Economic development has spawned the tide of industrial upgrading of intelligent manufacturing, creating huge development opportunities for machine vision enterprises. At present, the domestic machine vision industry as a whole is in a period of vigorous development. Specifically, the subdivision applications can be divided into two categories. The first is the traditional positioning and measurement applications. Domestic manufacturers are trying to catch up with American and Japanese enterprises, and the scheme manufacturers of secondary development will gradually withdraw. This subdivision is relatively orderly. Secondly, the application of visual inspection AOI, in the early development of several key industries, such as screen display industry overheating phenomenon, from the high expectations stage into the bubble of the trough. This market segment presents typical characteristics. Although the demand is still increasing, the high competition of many participating manufacturers has led to the decline of project profit margin. At the same time, the lack of long-term R & D accumulation and insufficient technical reserves can not cope with the new requirements put forward by customers, forcing the industry to enter a more efficient division of labor and cooperation stage, that is, the separation of visual platform and visual application. Facing the problem that each AOI manufacturer makes wheels repeatedly and cannot improve the technical level of the industry.
Baimai is committed to building a general AOI platform – visionpk is a mature testing platform that has been iterated for many years. It has reliable AOI visual detection capability. At present, it has fully enabled equipment supplier partners. The simplicity and easy-to-use features of the platform greatly reduce the cost of deployment and use in various application scenarios, and provide a surging power for the industry to get out of the low level of bubble, and form an efficient market collaboration ecosystem of visual platform + visual application. Due to international political factors, the semiconductor industry is accelerating the import substitution process to attract many manufacturers. Compared with the natural development cycle of foreign manufacturers for decades, domestic manufacturers need to concentrate resources to make up for their technical shortcomings, fine division of labor in all links, and interdependence between upstream and downstream ecology in order to achieve leapfrog development. Industry visual inspection equipment manufacturers need the empowerment of visual platform, so as to deeply cultivate in the vertical field. Visionpk general AOI platform has realized the AOI requirements of visual inspection covering the whole process section in the sealing and testing section of the semiconductor industry, including wafer AOI sorting, chip AOI, welding wire AOI, finished product AOI, lead frame and high-density carrier board.
Overall, the domestic demand for visual inspection continues to be strong. Although there are some phenomena of overheated investment and mixed eyes, most markets are entering an orderly and rapid development stage, and the level of division of labor and cooperation in some fields needs to be further improved. As a general AOI platform, Baimai visionpk fully enables equipment suppliers in 3C electronics and semiconductor industry to meet the increasing technical requirements of the industry.
4、 Please tell us about visionpk and visionok, which software platforms are competitive?
Compared with positioning measurement, visual detection requires higher detection function, not only in the detection ability of resolution and weak defects, but also in the technical quality of scheme evaluators. In order to promote the successful implementation of the project, visual inspection needs to make a comprehensive assessment in advance, which undoubtedly increases the risk for manufacturers with weak visual ability and lengthy cooperation links. Baimai application ability center strives to truly empower its visual ability to strategic partners, regularly carry out AOI knowledge training on software and hardware, and share industry application cases. Not only establish a fully functional experimental environment, equipped with perfect optical hardware and platform, but also help partners build their own visual laboratory and improve their own software and hardware strength, so as to accelerate the rapid landing of visual projects and realize the rapid expansion of visual business.
Taking the international leading technology enterprises as the benchmark, Baimai took the initiative to lay out two visual platforms, visionpk and visionok, and successfully broke the long-term monopoly of American and Japanese enterprises in this field. Visionpk is the first general AOI visual inspection platform, focusing on highly complex detection tasks. It has many advantages, such as independent underlying algorithm library, completely customized detection process, super whole line networking ability, AI empowerment and so on. Equipped with a full range of algorithm modules and distributed process structure, with high-performance detection ability, it can realize the complex detection requirements of multi shooting status, multi camera multi station linkage and high compatibility. Greatly improve the landing efficiency of visual projects and meet the visual needs of the manufacturing industry in an all-round way. Visionok general positioning and measurement platform focuses on general-purpose visual tasks, and is equipped with standardized algorithm modules such as common positioning, measurement and character reading. It takes into account ease of use and high cost performance, and excellently meets the detection requirements in common task scenarios. In terms of product strategy, Baimai adopts the brand route of separating the difficult AOI application from the traditional positioning and measurement application. After years of technical iteration, visionpk has realized the comprehensive coverage of 3C electronics, semiconductors, new energy vehicles and other fields. Visionok general positioning and measurement platform achieves the ultimate out of the box use. On the basis of the two visual platforms, Baimai continues to improve and expand the capability boundary of the platform, strengthen in-depth research on industrial application, pool industrial knowledge of different industries, solve the intelligent needs under specific scenes, and become the real eye and brain of China’s intelligent manufacturing.
5、 What changes and new opportunities do you think the machine vision industry will have in the next few years? How do you view these changes and opportunities? What strategic adjustments will Baimai make?
In the next few years, domestic machine vision enterprises will accelerate their development, the industry will tend to professional division of labor, and the independent vision platform will gradually surpass American and Japanese brands and grow into the main force of vision technology for intelligent manufacturing in China. At present, most domestic machine vision enterprises are factory oriented vision equipment manufacturers, and most of them adopt the way of secondary development to implement the project. Especially in visual inspection, it usually requires a large number of R & D personnel to develop and debug on site, and the long-term efficiency of the cycle is low. Under the general trend of specialization and division of labor, the visual industry is gradually layered, forming a collaborative ecosystem of visual platform companies, visual hardware companies and visual application companies. The former efficiently develops high-end visual technology, and the latter makes efficient application landing. By focusing on the underlying visual technology and product platform, the eyes and brain of intelligent manufacturing built by Baimai technology are fully enabling the industry to help the partners of visual application equipment manufacturers serve the terminal factory at a higher level and efficiency.