I. Challenges in Inventory Management
Timber is an indispensable and crucial resource in human life, widely applied in the fields of construction, furniture manufacturing, and various derivative products. Its significance is self-evident. For a long time, the operation mode of the timber industry has been highly reliant on manual labor. In recent years, with the development of the industry, the demand for automation in the timber industry has become increasingly urgent. For timber enterprises, factors such as labor shortages, the expectation of operating around the clock throughout the year, and the need to reduce operating costs have become the key driving forces for the development of automation. For small teams and individual practitioners, the timber industry not only means strenuous physical labor but also requires a great deal of time to be spent on basic tasks such as inventory management.
In the daily inventory management of the timber industry, counting is a vital and core link. Since timber is usually stored in large piles, whether it is the stacking of logs or the placement of boards, the phenomenon of mutual occlusion is extremely common. This makes manual counting not only inefficient, prone to problems such as missing counts and repeated counts but also difficult to ensure accuracy, greatly consuming human resources and time costs.
In addition, the diversity of timber further exacerbates the complexity of counting. There is a rich variety of timber types, with widely varying sizes and shapes. From small wooden squares to large logs, and from regular boards to specially shaped timbers, traditional counting software needs to be trained separately for different specifications to achieve accurate counting, resulting in high development costs. At the same time, the storage environment of timber is complex and changeable. When stacked outdoors, factors such as changes in light intensity, shadows, and weather conditions like rain, snow, and dust will seriously interfere with the counting work. In warehouses, there are problems such as insufficient lighting and a complex environment. These difficulties have led to low efficiency and inaccurate data in the counting work of the timber industry, severely hindering the development of inventory management towards automation and refinement. This not only significantly increases the operating costs of enterprises but also has a negative impact on the scientific formulation of production plans and the fairness and justice of transactions.
II. Integration of CountAnything
CountAnything continues to expand the boundaries of its application in the timber industry through in-depth cooperation with timber enterprises in Asia, the Americas, and other regions. Enterprises can obtain accurate timber counting data quickly by purchasing the CountAnything license or directly integrating it into their existing systems, and automatically generate analysis reports for inventory management and resource allocation. This innovative counting method not only greatly improves work efficiency but also significantly reduces labor costs. At the same time, CountAnything also has outstanding safety advantages - employees no longer need to be beside the dangerous log piles for manual counting and measurement, avoiding safety risks from the source.
In the field of timber counting, different categories of timber pose differentiated challenges to counting technologies. For logs, their non-standard cylindrical shapes, with common irregular features such as bends and knots, make it difficult for traditional photo counting software to accurately capture their core visual features. Relying on the powerful T-Rex2 model, CountAnything, with its excellent object feature recognition ability, can quickly and accurately identify the unique shapes of logs, greatly improving the accuracy of log counting.
Figure 1: CountAnything Counts Logs
In contrast, the thorny problem of traditional counting software lies in the identification and counting of square timbers or boards with regular shapes like rectangular cross-sections and similar appearances. These objects have smooth surfaces and similar textures, and they are extremely likely to overlap and fit closely when stacked. During the identification process, photo software has difficulty distinguishing the boundaries of the overlapping parts of the objects, resulting in counting errors or being unable to accurately distinguish the number of layers and the quantity of square timbers or boards. Based on the capabilities of the T-Rex2 model, CountAnything has delved deep into the timber industry, collected many optimization suggestions from timber workers, and carried out specialized optimizations for the identification of square timbers and boards, thus improving the accuracy of photo counting.
Figure 2: CountAnything Counts Square Timbers
The counting experience accumulated by CountAnything in the timber industry not only effectively helps timber enterprises transform towards automated inventory management. More importantly, this excellent model ability can also be applied to construction and industrial scenarios such as the statistics of steel bars and bricks, providing more efficient and intelligent counting solutions for partners in these industries.
References
(1) Paper: "T-Rex2: Towards Generic Object Detection via Text-Visual Prompt Synergy" by Qing Jiang, Feng Li, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Lei Zhang. Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14610
(2) Access T-Rex2 API through DINO-X Platform: https://cloud.deepdataspace.com/
(3) CountAnything, the fast & precise counting tool based on T-Rex2: https://deepdataspace.com/products/countanything