Company or Institution

Smartex Europe, Unipessoal Lda,

Industry

Textiles

Website

https://smartex.ai/

Country

Portugal

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

General description of the AI solution

The global textile industry is worth $3T per year, making it one of the most financially viable & lucrative industries in the world. Unfortunately, its environmental implications are equally massive. The textile industry is responsible for 20% of global clean water pollution & emits 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Part of this impact is due to waste generated throughout the production process, resulting from defective textiles. In most cases, these defects are only detected in the final inspection stages which are performed manually.
Since these defects cannot be undone, the produced textiles inevitably become waste & end up incinerated or in landfills. It is estimated that 3 to 5% of textiles contain defects after the knitting stage, so, technologies that may contribute to the reduction of textile waste will have a huge impact on the textile industry as well as the environment.
In response to these issues, SMARTEX has developed a system based on artificial intelligence and machine vision that can detect defects at the point of production and prevent recurrence of defects. This leads to the reduction of the defective textiles to close to 0% with evident economic and environmental benefits.
AI plays a crucial role in the system developed by SMARTEX, since it is responsible for identifying and classifying the defects in the fabrics. Because fabrics have complex structures, flexibility, a wide variety of colours, multiple yarn combinations, are produced in different machines and operate in industrial environments, defects have an enormous variability and shape, making it difficult to conduct a 100% inspection, which is otherwise impossible.

Github, open data repository, prototype or working demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENMHw9Q8PFE

Publications

1-EIC Grant for development of the inspection system 2018-2021 – grant number 946915 attributed in H2020 european research programme.

2-Web Summit 2021 – award for PITCH startup competition

3-BfK Innovation Awards Portugal 2021, promoted by Altice Portugal – award for promising technologies;

Needs