Unlocking the Potential of Industrial Automation: Zebra's Advanced DL OCR Technology

Everyone has seen commercials showing the amazing photo and video quality that today’s smartphones can produce. But few people realize just how powerful today’s advanced imaging and sensing technologies have really become, particularly when you get beyond consumer smartphones and into the realm of industrial automation.

A great example is the new family of industrial automation devices from Zebra, which not only enable both machine vision and fixed industrial scanning from a single hardware and software platform, but also come equipped with Zebra’s Deep-Learning Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Zebra’s DL OCR uses each device’s on-board sensor to automatically extract text and information from images. But it does it faster and more easily than any other solution, thanks to machine learning capabilities.

Using Zebra’s Aurora Focus software, you can simply draw a box around an image and tell the sensor to read, recognize and extract characters automatically. The sensor captures an image, and the software extracts text and information instantly. It provides accurate reads and adapts to lighting, contrast and backgrounds automatically, even when dealing with low-contrast characters or confusing backgrounds.

On production and packaging lines, this translates into high-speed DL OCR that can be applied to thousands of parts, components, finished goods, labels, bottles or packages moving on conveyors and through key points in your processes.

It also means you can capture text and information from images without font or text training. You don’t have to spend time training your device or its sensor. It does the job all on its own using highly sophisticated sensor technology, advanced algorithms, and deep-learning intelligence.

A sensor that can learn on its own might even seem a bit scary, but there’s no need to worry about an AI takeover with this technology. Zebra’s software does the real work—executing the DL OCR jobs that you define and saving a huge amount of time in setting up OCR applications.

Instead of training or retraining your cameras or sensors to recognize different fonts or text, you can just let Zebra’s sensors and software dynamically adjust to virtually any scenario and start giving you reliable reads right away. You don’t end up losing hours, days or weeks trying to get your DL OCR solution to recognize a new font, capture a letter, or character that’s skewed, rotated, stretched or compressed. Zebra’s software teaches its own algorithm, and you can set thresholds to help it differentiate between different character strings, such as mathematical, alphanumeric size or spacing.

Additionally, Zebra’s Aurora Focus software makes it all amazingly simple, even for a beginner. Zebra’s Aurora Focus software was designed to be a truly modern and streamlined user experience, with radio buttons, sliders, and simple drop-down menus to define every job and control every setting. It also includes built-in videos and tutorials to walk you through all of its machine vision and fixed scanning capabilities, so you can actually learn as you go.

Importantly, though, you don’t just get DL OCR capabilities with Zebra’s industrial automation platform. Its plug-and-play sensors and smart cameras offer a full complement of tool sets, including the following:

• 1D/2D/DPM scanning
• Object location
• Pixel counting
• Brightness detection
• Contrast detection
• Edge detection
• Distance measurement
• Pattern recognition
• Caliper tool
• Circle finding
• Filters
• OCV/flaw recognition

All of these capabilities are available from one hardware and software platform, so you don’t need to buy separate devices or software applications, and you don’t have to go through multiple learning curves to get the results you need. With Zebra, everything has been consolidated and simplified, so it’s cheaper and faster to get your industrial automation jobs up and running, but the tools available to you are just as powerful and sophisticated as the most specialized sensors and smart cameras.

To learn more about Zebra’s DL OCR tool, read our Deep-Learning OCR Fact Sheet, and to learn more about Zebra’s complete portfolio of machine vision and fixed scanning solutions, read our MV/FIS brochure. Then, if you have any questions or want to explore these solutions further, set up a 15 minute exploratory call, request sample hardware to test, or to have us design and build out a solution for you.