by John Lund, Sales and Marketing Director (Global), Visy Oy

Aspects of science fiction films from the 1980s and 90s are becoming a reality in the modern container terminal.

Some 20 years ago, vision technology in terminal operations was limited to optical character recognition (OCR) for container code recognition (CCR) and license plate recognition (LPR; also referred to as automatic number plate recognition, ANPR, depending on your geography).

The game-changer in vision technology occurred in 2013 with the advent of dynamic neural networks (DNN).

Long story short, using a DNN provides a faster, more efficient, and more accurate way to extract data from images using deep learning techniques.

The benefit for the industry is that virtually everything that you photograph can be automatically digitised and therefore used as a basis for process automation.

The latest application for container terminals, and those interested in a container’s condition, comes in the form of Visy's Automatic Damage Detection System (ADDS), the first system of its kind.

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