Canon Inc. has announced the beginning of a new partnership with AVEVA Group plc to realise together smart factories – innovative facilities in which production equipment and machinery are connected to a network – through Canon imaging technologies. It also plans to provide a wide range of system solutions that accelerate the automation of factories and improve productivity through the Canon Industrial Imaging Platform.

The partnership brings together technologies such as Canon’s network camera and industrial camera technologies and image processing technologies to achieve ‘factory visualisation’. With the help of AVEVA, the company will be able to provide a variety of solutions to support factory automation, combining the wide range of AVEVA capabilities, including industrial automation and information management software, with the imaging technology Canon has cultivated over its long history.

As part of the strategy, AVEVA’s InTouch SCADA system will be integrated with Canon products – network camera, industrial camera and software for production centres – to create new value, based on video and image processing technologies employed on factory floors.

Starting with September 2018, Canon network cameras will be capable of utilising AVEVA software, enabling remote monitoring of factory floors from locations such as production control departments and central monitoring rooms. Moreover, the capabilities of this software will be gradually expanded and users will be able to link the information collected from AVEVA software with Canon’s Monitoring Edition video management software and Vision Edition image processing software.

The combination of the two technologies enable efficient monitoring of a factory’s operational status through video recording and image processing technology. This makes possible the automation of tasks conventionally performed by human workers, including the prevention of problems before they happen or fast recovery of production equipment.

In the future, Canon plans to expand the Intelligent Functions of its network camera and also link the information detectable only by these cameras to AVEVA software, aiming to further improve production efficiency.

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