Industrial automation, machine vision case

Intro

Cognex is the world’s leading provider of vision systems, software, sensors, and industrial barcode readers used in manufacturing automation. Thanks to innovative industrial AI, Cognex technology improves product quality, prevents production errors, reduces manufacturing costs, and helps companies deliver high-quality products at an affordable price. The systems detect defects, monitor production lines, guide assembly robots, and track, sort, and identify parts.

Cognex works with many industries, including automotive, electronics, food and beverage, life sciences, logistics, OEM machine building, product security, vision-guided robotics, etc. The company uses data from billions of synthetic and real-world images to train its systems, which are then used to monitor operations, adjust production plans, and manage processes in real time across global supply chains.

Cognex also develops new technology. Its flagship In-Sight systems combine a camera, software, and processor in one compact industrial unit. It handles complex inspection tasks such as optical character recognition, assembly verification, and defect detection.

The challenge

Cognex approached Keymakr to label data for two main use cases: object detection and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Project challenges:

High accuracy. Any annotation errors directly affect production algorithms.

Data variety. Objects ranged from simple boxes to small parts and irregular items.

Flexibility. Work was conducted on demand, and sometimes data arrived in large batches that required urgent completion.

Scalable workload. Some tasks required rapid team scaling up and down to match the nature of the project.

Results

Close collaboration: over a period of 1.5 years

Average annotation accuracy: 99.53%

Flexible delivery: Keymakr works “on-demand” while easily scaling the team.

Scalable operations: multiple OCR and object detection projects of varying sizes can run simultaneously.

This project demonstrated that high-precision OCR and object detection datasets can be produced at scale without compromising quality. Keymakr’s phased delivery, flexible workflow, and focus on accuracy ensured that Cognex could train reliable AI models efficiently.

"Keymakr has been an invaluable partner to Cognex by significantly reducing the time and effort required for data labeling thanks to their exceptional accuracy and reliability. By leveraging Keymakr’s services, our algorithm engineers have been able to focus on what matters most to Cognex - developing cutting-edge vision algorithms.

Their flexibility and precision have consistently exceeded our expectations. In fact, the quality of their labeling has reached a point where manual review on our end is virtually unnecessary. The process of creating a new project is seamless: upload a set of images, communicate expectations and accuracy requirements with the project manager, and let the labeling begin.

Throughout each project, we’ve been able to monitor progress using Keymakr’s intuitive online tools for image and label review. At the end of each sprint, they deliver well-structured, parsable JSON files that integrate effortlessly with our AI training pipelines.

We’ve been thoroughly impressed by Keymakr’s professionalism, responsiveness, and genuine care for us as customers. Their team is always ready to jump in at a moment’s notice to take on new image sets and keep the momentum going.

If you're new to AI development and considering doing labeling in-house, I strongly recommend investing in Keymakr. Their services are not only accurate and affordable but also a huge time-saver."

Nick Mullan, Cognex Engineer

"Cooperation with Cognex and specifically with Nick was always fast, efficient, and open. We maintain transparency regarding our estimations, timelines, and hours usage. There were no cases of any disagreement or misalignment. Our gratitude to the whole Cognex team."

Roman Gron, Keymakr PM

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Reviews
on

"Delivering Quality and Excellence"

The upside of working with Keymakr is their strategy to annotations. You are given a sample of work to correct before they begin on the big batches. This saves all parties time and...

"Great service, fair price"

Ability to accommodate different and not consistent workflows.
Ability to scale up as well as scale down.
All the data was in the custom format that...

"Awesome Labeling for ML"

I have worked with Keymakr for about 2 years on several segmentation tasks.
They always provide excellent edge alignment, consistency, and speed...

How Keymakr helped Cognex with OCR and object detection datasets