Employees work on the assembly line of a carmaker in Qingdao, Shandong province. [Photo by Zhang Jingang/for chinadaily.com.cn]

Zhao Yubo, executive dean of Shandong Institutes of Industrial Technology, led a team to conduct special research on seven home appliance manufacturing factories in Qingdao West Coast New Area and Jiaozhou city recently.

"By empowering artificial intelligence, we can greatly improve the efficiency of quality inspection and production. Many companies have included the transformation of machine vision on the production line in their 2024 work plans," said Zhao.

"Machine vision is the key technology for the upgrade of the real economy from automation to intelligence," he said, adding that the institute established the first machine vision concept verification center in Shandong in August.

The center is aiming to build a "one-stop AI plus vision" software and hardware platform that will shorten the cycle of enterprises' technology equipment. Since its establishment, the center has provided services to more than 110 companies, he said.

The institute also helps Qingdao become a leader in modern industries by connecting the city with universities, research institutes and global innovation resources.

At present, the institute has established cooperative relations with scholars from nearly 20 institutions, including Shandong University (Qingdao campus), Qingdao University, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Nankai University, University of Georgia, North China Electric Power University, and Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  

"We have cooperated with professor Tu Changhe's team from Shandong University to promote the implementation of defect detection and analysis projects based on machine vision and AI," said Zhao.

He added that the successful transformation of relevant research results has also accelerated the convergence of high-quality projects in such sectors as intelligent manufacturing, computational medicine, and integration of information and intelligence.

The main construction of Asia's first cylindrical floating production, storage and offloading facility, designed and built by China, is finished on Dec 6 in Qingdao, Shandong province. [Photo/WeChat account: gh_204dae95445b]