In the case study I provide a deep dive into the area of food production (bakery goods) in europe´s largest bakery factory. The case study is about how we successfully implemented Computer Vision to monitor our production process to evaluate 3.5 mio. bakery goods every day. I will show how this leads to a reduction of food waste during production and how this is aligned with environmental/sustainability goals in food production. I will motivate why AI on the edge was identified as being a crucial success factor and which considerations we took as Schwarz group to get started in this area 3 years ago. I will discuss – based on the case study – how we selected and benchmarked hardware chips (Nvidia, Intel, GPU vs CPU…), how we needed to change software engineering to accommodate for Edge AI, how we integrated edge AI models into our cloud-based infrastructure, how we do the deployment and how/why we still use cloud-based GPUs for model training.
