Grants and Contributions

The purpose of this CanExport SMEs agreement is to support small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for activities related to export market development that are part of an export business case for a specific target market, particularly where activities are targeting departmental priority markets and sectors.

The purpose of this CanExport SMEs agreement is to support small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for activities related to export market development that are part of an export business case for a specific target market, particularly where activities are targeting departmental priority markets and sectors.

Pacefactory is developing video analytics software for manufacturing production efficiency. This software will analyze the work patterns of people and machines in order to help determine production efficiency improvement opportunities. The concept of standardized work that was developed by Toyota and has been adopted by most manufacturing companies in their operational excellence and continuous improvement teams. The process of creating and auditing standardized work is manual, often completed using time studies with clipboards, stopwatches, and spreadsheet templates. Pacefactory is developing a way to automate this through video analytics.

Pacefactory is looking at enhancing it's object classification engine through the development of a version of machine learning (ML) algorithm to more accurately determine the type of object that is in motion. Currently Pacefactory relies on computer vision metadata attributes to classify a moving object as a person, vehicle, light etc. One of the challenges with this approach is that in some video scenes it is difficult to distinguish objects with a high degree of accuracy. The idea of this project is to test supplementing classification of data using existing ML methods or a variation of these techniques to improve the accuracy of results so that more use cases can be included in the core product offering.

Metadata that is created from video is used to define objects in the scene and then rules are applied to the motion of these objects to determine if the behaviour observed is compliant or not. There are patterns to the data that could provide additional insight into the application that customers are looking for in problem solving efficiency and safety issues. Improvements to the current methods and development of new capabilities that have yet to be commercialized are the outcomes of this project. Extending our safety applications and development of production efficiency use cases will be the primary focus of the data analysts work.

Pacefactory is embarking on a project with an online retailer to help improve worker safety in their distribution warehouses. The project scope will include 10 locations in Canada and the US to measure and improve pedestrian and forklift safety. The goal is to demonstrate the applicability and scalability of the Pacefactory solution. If successful, the next step is to explore how the application can be broadly deployed as a corporate standard to improve the health and safety of all warehouse employees globally.

The purpose of this project is to develop a graphical user interface (GUI) that will allow for faster and more reliable configuration changes for the Pacefactory Safety analysis platform. The current method of configuration required “hard coding” settings and parameters by the software developers and takes a highly skilled resource a long time for each change. The idea is to simplify the configuration process so that all Pacefactory staff or any customers and partners can create new safety rules and make configuration changes at a lower cost and improved end user experience. This will not only improve profitability for Pacefactory but accelerate adoption and scalability of the Safety platform as sales grow.